What is the relationship between price and cost in your company? Does that sound like an obvious question? In many companies price is driven by cost. The company determines the cost of its product or service and then sets the price based on its margin targets.

But there is an alternative. Some companies start with price and let that set the baseline for cost. One of the most famous practioners of price-led costing was Henry Ford. In his book, Pricing on Purpose, Creating and Capturing Value, Ronald J. Baker talks about how price-based costing drove many of the Ford’s employee and process-based innovations. As I’ve argued in the past, innovation is driven by constraints and starting with a price creates a tremendous constraint.

There is an opportunity to adapt these practices to execution. Research shows that most major initiatives fail to deliver their intended value. And, for those that do deliver some value, it is often long in coming. Often scheduling practices are similar to pricing practices. We let the inputs dictate the terms of the outputs.

But what if we reverse it and take a “value-led” scheduling approach. As with a pricing-led approach, the key would be to start at the point of value and work backward.

Perhaps there is a value-drop defined for each quarter. The leader’s job is to determine how to best use his or her resources to deliver against that timeframe.

Imagine how this approach might change our thinking:

1) Outsourcing certain tasks would become much more attractive
2) Off-the-shelf solutions (i.e., reducing customization and tailoring) would be more viable and necessary
3) “80%” solutions would be better tolerated
4) There would be greater focus on differentiating high and low value features and functions

I regularly hear leaders talk about striving to think in these four ways. Yet, as long as milestones are effort-based (rather than the other way around) there is less incentive and need to change.

I’ve started asking a new question when reviewing progress on initiatives. That question is, “Has anything changed for our customer yet?” If you can’t answer “yes” every couple of months, it might be time to rethink the content and timing of your milestones.

Brad Kolar is the President of Kolar Associates, a leadership consulting and workforce productivity consulting firm. He can be reached at brad.kolar@kolarassociates.com.