Editorial
It’s common to encounter senior leaders afflicted with what’s colloquially known as shiny object syndrome — the tendency to chase new things at the expense of existing priorities. Think of the CEO who returns from a conference with a dozen new ideas or the board member who reads an article about a competitor’s move and insists you scrap everything you’re working on and pivot.
At the C-suite level, the inability to prioritize introduces strategic risk. It leads to poor execution, failed investments and unclear direction for teams. More than missed deadlines or budget overruns, the real danger is a loss of organizational focus and momentum.
Sure, you can always look at traditional prioritization frameworks such as the Impact-Effort Matrix or the Eisenhower Matrix. But if you’d like to move beyond them, the following five imperatives offer a sharper approach to achieving ruthless prioritization.
1. Anchor Prioritization in a Crisp, Coherent Strategy
One of the most common reasons organizations struggle to prioritize is not a failure of analytical capability, but a lack of strategic clarity. Most teams can perform cost-benefit analyses. What they lack is a cohesive framework against which to evaluate trade-offs.
Effective strategy should answer the following fundamental questions:
- Who are we as a company?
- Which customers do we serve?
- How do we create differentiated value — a unique benefit only we can offer — for them?
Beyond positioning, strategy should serve as a decision-making compass. When investment opportunities emerge — whether in the form of new product ideas, operational improvements or merger and acquisition plays — the strategy should clarify which initiatives reinforce the organization’s core direction and which are merely distractions.
2. Make Saying 'No' a Requirement
Strategy, by definition, is as much about what you exclude as what you pursue. However, few organizations institutionalize the discipline of saying “no.” Focus must be embedded into every aspect of the culture.
Steve Jobs understood this deeply.
Former Apple Chief Design Officer, Jony Ive, often recounts that focus was one of the greatest lessons he learned from Jobs, who would challenge him regularly: “How many things have you said ‘no’ to lately?” Under Jobs’ leadership, Apple was an organization where saying “no” was not just encouraged, but required. Not in the pursuit of minimalism for its own sake, but because true innovation and impact require concentrated effort on a select few priorities.
Saying “no” to poor or average ideas is easy. The real challenge is declining good ideas that don’t align with strategic direction. That level of discipline should be deliberately cultivated, not left to chance.
3. Establish a Rigorous System to Evaluate Ideas
Ideas are never in short supply. They emerge from every corner of the enterprise: employees, board members and customers all bring different perspectives. The C-suite’s responsibility, however, is distinguishing signal from noise with a systematic and context-specific approach to evaluating ideas. When advising leaders, I ask the following five questions for every new idea or initiative:
- Will this initiative help us serve customers better?
- Do we stand to lose something meaningful (e.g., market share) by not pursuing it?
- Do we have the financial resources, infrastructure and executive sponsorship required to pursue it effectively?
- Do we have access to the right talent (and enough of it) to execute successfully?
- Can we pursue it without materially slowing down other high-priority initiatives?
If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” leaders needn’t immediately discard the idea, but instead explore whether the “no” can be turned into a “yes” through creative resourcing, phasing or rescoping. If the answer remains unfavorable, the initiative may not be viable. Creating a “parking lot” of longer-term possibilities keeps your options open without derailing focus.
4. Build World-Class Decision-Making Capabilities
Executives make hundreds of decisions each week about strategy, operations, people, risk and growth. These decisions determine the organization’s future, employees’ careers and wellbeing, and shareholder returns. Excellent decision-making remains the most important and durable source of value any executive team delivers.
And yet, many leaders waste their valuable decision-making energy. They spend too much time on inconsequential choices (such as the boss who obsesses over fonts in a document) while rushing through the monumental ones (such as the time when SoftBank’s CEO invested $4.4 billion in WeWork following a 28-minute interaction with founder Adam Neumann). Author James Clear offers a simple but powerful mental model for decision-making: hats, haircuts and tattoos.
- Hats represent decisions that are low stakes and easily reversible. If you try on a hat and don’t like it, move on quickly and try another. In fact, trying on many hats is beneficial, because the cost to reverse the decision is low. Examples include testing a different subject line in an email campaign, piloting a minor price tweak in a limited market or experimenting with meeting formats. These decisions can be made quickly, often with minimal data and without layers of approvals. Delaying or over-analyzing these slows down the organization unnecessarily.
- Haircuts carry moderate stakes and take longer to reverse. You can fix a bad haircut, but it might take a while for it to grow out. Chances are, by this time next year, you will have moved on from it. Think: introducing a new policy, reorganizing a team or shifting part of your go-to-market strategy. Don’t be afraid to try a new haircut from time to time — these are calculated risks that allow you to innovate and create learning opportunities for teams. Mistakes in haircuts are recoverable, but they will leave a mark for awhile.
- Tattoos are high-stakes and often irreversible. These decisions demand deep deliberation, rigorous scenario planning and multiple perspectives. The cost of getting them wrong is significant and often not recoverable. This is where executives should spend most of their time and energy. Examples include entering or exiting a major market, acquiring a company, pivoting the core business model or removing a key executive.
Understanding which category a decision falls into is the first step toward aligning leadership time, attention and governance. Without this clarity, teams risk spending too much time on low-impact choices (such as debating endlessly over slide formats or meeting cadences) while rushing through decisions that will reshape the company for years to come.
5. Tackle the Hardest Problems First
Astro Teller, who used to be head of Google’s “moonshots” arm, offers a compelling metaphor: Imagine you’re trying to teach a monkey to recite Shakespeare atop a 10-foot pedestal. Should you build the pedestal first or train the monkey? Most people intuitively say, “Train the monkey.” And yet, in business, teams often build the pedestal first.
We see this time and again: a team celebrates a sleek prototype before validating the underlying algorithm. Marketing rolls out a glossy campaign before the product is ready. This phenomenon reflects a systemic issue: We celebrate the visible, the polished, the easy-to-measure. To break this cycle, leaders must take a hard look at their performance management practices by asking:
- Are we measuring the right outcomes?
- Are incentives aligned with solving core challenges?
- Are we tackling the most difficult problems first, or just building beautiful pedestals?
If your organization celebrates surface-level wins disproportionately, it may be time to revisit performance metrics, leadership behaviors and recognition practices.
Staying the Course in a World of Distraction
Avoiding shiny object syndrome is not about suppressing curiosity or ambition. It’s about channeling those instincts through a strategic lens. The world will keep moving faster. Distractions will keep multiplying. But those who master the art of saying “no,” focus on the essential and solve the hardest problems first will keep the signal above the noise.
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Editor's Note: Read more leadership advice below:
- The Trout Stack or: Why 'Why' Is the Key to Transformational Leadership — ‘Why’ is perhaps the most powerful, destructive and dangerous question ever uttered. It can also be a great source of inspiration.
- Fixing Internal Misalignment in 2025: A VUCA Framework for Leadership Clarity — Internal misalignment causes companies to fall into reactive cycles, unable to execute effectively, with negative impacts on their profitability.
- Building High-Performing Executive Teams — The best executive teams aren't merely collections of highly talented individuals; they operate with strategic alignment, trust and a shared commitment.
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