By:Not long after Kraft Foods bought Cadbury, the British-based chocolate company, in early 2010, a group of Kraft leaders visited the team responsible for Cadbury in India. If the Indian managers thought they could catch their breath after the long and rancorous walk-up to the deal, they got a major surprise.The Kraft leaders quickly announced the new target: Increase revenues for Cadbury in India by 25 per cent by the end of the year, from $400 million to $500 million.The Cadbury team was still reeling when Kraft announced the other side of the stunning goal: Kraft would pay what it took to get there. Before the end of the year, Cadbury in India had hit the $500-million target. The device used to accomplish that remarkable surge was a blank cheque: the one-two punch of a mind-bogglingly big goal and a promise to provide the resources necessary to achieve it.The success is grounded in a fairly basic principle: If people are freed from budget constraints, their imaginations can soar. They take a broader look at what’s possible. And, as was the case with Cadbury, they take a harder look at what really works.We have seen blank cheques triumph in assorted contexts and different geographies. Kraft used it to turn Oreo into a best-selling cookie in China after the American favourite had struggled there for a decade trying to break into the market.Fonterra Brands, the New Zealand-based dairy cooperative, built a thriving food service business with an igniting boost from a blank check. This powerful device shouldn’t be used to give a one-shot boost to earnings. The point is to create sustainable, profitable growth, growth that will build on itself. Before company leaders sign the blank cheque, the team receiving it has to come up with a business model that shows genuine promise.And once the cheque is signed, leaders need to monitor progress closely. If milestones aren’t met after a certain point, turn off the spigot, learn from the failure. But blank cheques succeed far more often than they fail. Team managers feel the pressure of the faith placed in them. And they feel as if they own the project.Where does the money to fund the blank cheque come from? Every business has operations that lag or move inefficiently. Those need to be trimmed or cut to channel resources to the blank cheque. That means company leaders have to make some tough decisions about priorities. But leaders do that all the time. The blank cheque should provide the momentum to be particularly aggressive about it. Savings can help fund the cheques.Once the Cadbury blank cheque team recovered from the shock of its huge new target, the members got to work on a plan. Given the short time frame, team members decided to double down on Cadbury’s strongest asset in India, the Dairy Milk chocolate bar.The team knew that the best sales came in retail outlets that displayed Dairy Milk in so-called visi coolers, refrigerated glass cases that showcased the candy and kept it from melting in the summer heat.So the blank cheque underwrote an increase in locations with visi coolers from 20,000 to 40,000. At the same time, the team raised the visibility of Dairy Milk, doubling the number of in-store displays from 5,000 to 10,000 and expanding distribution into 2,100 additional towns and villages.The budget for advertising and promotions jumped by 45 per cent. Perhaps most important, that frightening new goal forced the Cadbury blank cheque team to re-evaluate the positioning of Dairy Milk.The team moved Dairy Milk from competing in the category of chocolates into the larger market of sweets in general, in the process expanding the occasions when consumers would reach for a Dairy Milk bar.The overall results beat expectations. Cadbury in India hit the $500 million target ahead of schedule, making the year the unit’s best ever, with almost 28% revenue growth. Things went so well that the team even returned some of the blank cheque allocation. And the success has legs. Cadbury in India continued to perform well. (Since the breakup of Kraft in 2013, Cadbury is part of Mondelez International.)Sanjay Khosla is former President, Kraft Foods, Developing Markets. Mohanbir Sawhney is Director, Center for Research in Technology & Innovation, Kellogg School of Management.