Everything Matters. That’s the Problem.

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Written By Jeff Winter

If companies had a Corporate Doctor, I think a lot of appointments would go something like this:

Corporate Doctor: “Read the top line.”
Company: “Growth.”

Corporate Doctor: “Good. Next line.”
Company: “AI. Cybersecurity. New products. Cost reduction. Customer experience. New markets. Supply chain. Talent. Automation…”

Corporate Doctor: “Stop. Which one are you actually focused on?”
Company: “Yes.”

Corporate Doctor: “That’s not how focus works. How many priorities do you have?”
Company: “Twelve.”

Corporate Doctor: “How many did you have last year?”
Company: “Nine.”

Corporate Doctor: “What did you stop doing?”
Company: “Nothing. But we did add AI.”
Corporate Doctor: “Of course you did.”

Company: “Can you prescribe something?”
Corporate Doctor: “Yes. Focus.”

Company: “Is that a platform?”
Corporate Doctor: “No.”

Company: “Can we buy it?”
Corporate Doctor: “Also no.”

Company: “Can we create a task force for it?”
Corporate Doctor: “I’m beginning to understand how you got here.”

Everything keeps making the list

The funny part is that the company in that conversation is not being irrational. Growth probably does matter. AI probably matters. Cybersecurity definitely matters. There may actually be a new market worth entering, a product that needs to launch, costs that need to come out, and a competitor doing something that deserves attention. That is what makes this whole focus thing harder than the usual advice of “just prioritize better.”

Accenture found in 2025 that 90% of C-suite leaders said the pace of change had accelerated during the year, and 84% expected it to accelerate further. Then Deloitte’s 2026 Global Chief Strategy Officer Survey found that 95% of CSOs expect competitive dynamics to materially affect their priorities, 95% say the same about AI and technology disruption, and more than half already say they have too many priorities and too little time. That is a weird combination when you think about it. We already have too much on the list, while almost everything happening outside the company is giving us another perfectly defensible reason to make the list longer.

Strategy, as a formal role, is actually the newest part of my career. I grew up much more in sales and marketing, and somewhere in there I started realizing that great execution gets messy pretty quickly when everyone is running hard in slightly different directions. Sales wants one thing, marketing another, product has its view, operations has another, and everyone has a spreadsheet proving why theirs is sensible. You eventually need something that coordinates all of that. You need an actual strategy.

Now that strategy is where I spend much more of my time, I appreciate something I had seen forever but never fully appreciated: almost every company says it has a strategy. A lot of them have goals. Some have plans. Many have a giant pile of initiatives. Far fewer have made the choices that turn all of that into a strategy. And this is absolutely not just something I have seen inside companies I worked for. Spend enough time on advisory boards, leadership councils and industry groups and you hear the same basic conversation wearing different logos. None of this is new. I am just much more aware of it now.

We keep solving overload by adding things

This may be the part I find most fascinating. When a new problem appears, the corporate reflex is usually additive. New technology? Launch an initiative. New competitor? Form a team. Growth slowing? New program. AI? Well, obviously something with AI. There is almost always a meeting where someone says, “We need to put more focus on this,” which generally results in adding another thing for everyone to focus on.

IBM’s 2025 CEO Study found that 64% of CEOs said fear of falling behind can cause them to invest in technologies before they clearly understand the value. Half also said recent investment had left their organizations with disconnected, piecemeal technology. I actually have a lot of sympathy for that. Nobody wants to be the executive who ignored something huge because they were being “disciplined.” If the bet works for your competitor and you passed, that decision gets remembered. Saying yes is much safer in the room. The damage from saying yes too often is fuzzier. It shows up six months later as five projects running late, the same three people appearing on every steering committee, a budget spread thin enough that nothing is really funded properly, and calendars that look like somebody lost a game of Tetris.

Something else I found totally unrelated but interesting while researching this: the word “priority” was used in the singular for centuries. The basic idea was precedence. One thing came before another. At some point we apparently decided this concept needed a plural, and corporate life eventually perfected it by creating twelve “top priorities” at the same time. I know language evolves, but I am with the 1400s on this one.

Maybe the real strategy is what disappears

I think this is where a lot of strategy work falls apart. We spend enormous amounts of time discussing what we should do and surprisingly little time discussing what we are going to stop doing. The first conversation is energizing. The second one involves somebody's budget, somebody's project, or something the CEO mentioned at an offsite nine months ago, so it tends to become less popular.

PwC’s 2026 Global CEO Survey found CEOs spend 47% of their time on issues less than a year away and only 16% on issues more than five years out. The stat I found even more interesting was that only about one in four CEOs said their companies have disciplined processes for stopping underperforming initiatives. That feels about right. Companies have gates for approving projects, committees for funding them, teams for launching them, dashboards for tracking them, and monthly reviews for discussing why they are yellow instead of green. The process for stopping one is sometimes closer to everyone gradually realizing nobody has mentioned it since February.

So maybe every time something gets added to the strategy, there should be a second box right next to it: “What changes because we are doing this?” What gets stopped? What gets pushed six months? What gets fewer people? What gets less money? What are we acknowledging is important, but not important enough right now? If the answer is nothing, then I am not sure we made a choice. We just added work. And I think that is what focus really is. Not staring harder at the same giant list. Not telling everyone to “focus on the priorities” when there are eleven of them. It is reducing the number of things that are allowed to consume serious organizational attention in the first place.

The world will probably keep getting better at giving companies more options. New technologies, new markets, new competitors, new products, new risks. There will always be another thing worth doing.

The job of strategy is not to collect all of them. It is to decide which ones actually get to stay.

References:

Jeff Winter
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