The CEO is halfway through a slide deck that looks like it was designed by someone who eats exclusively at neon-lit diners, and I can feel the collective blood pressure of the 45 people in the room rising toward a dangerous plateau. He is talking about ‘synergy,’ ‘vertical expansion,’ and a new AI-driven initiative that will apparently solve problems we didn’t know we had 25 minutes ago. I look over at Ian P.-A., our lead precision welder who somehow ended up in this town hall. Ian isn’t looking at the screen. He’s looking at his hands, probably calculating the thermal expansion of a 55-millimeter joint, and I can see the exact moment he decides to stop caring about the corporate mission. It’s a quiet click, like a breaker flipping in a basement.

We are currently managing 15 ‘top-tier’ priorities. By the end of this presentation, that number will climb to 25. The executive team is nodding with the kind of practiced enthusiasm that usually precedes a massive stock sell-off or a nervous breakdown. They think this is ambition. They think that saying ‘yes’ to every shiny object on the horizon is a sign of a growth mindset. In reality, it is a sign of profound intellectual cowardice. It is the inability to make a choice, and in business, the refusal to choose is the fastest way to become mediocre at 105 different things.

The Paralysis of Perfect Choice

I spent 45 minutes this morning comparing the price of the exact same stainless steel kettle across five different sites. I knew it was a waste of time. I knew that the $5 I might save was worth less than the mental energy I was burning, but I did it anyway because I was paralyzed by the desire to make the ‘perfect’ choice. This is the same sickness that infects leadership. We are so afraid of missing out on the next big trend that we end up doing everything poorly. We become so focused on the marginal gains of a new initiative that we ignore the fact that our core infrastructure is held together by 85 lines of legacy code and the sheer willpower of two junior engineers who haven’t slept since the last ‘pivot.’

Ian P.-A. once told me that a weld is only as good as the breath you hold. He’s 55 years old and has the steady hands of a surgeon who specializes in robots. If you ask him to weld a titanium plate while simultaneously checking the pressure on a boiler 15 meters away, he’ll walk off the job. He knows that precision requires an absolute, almost monastic focus on the single point where the heat meets the metal. When leadership adds ‘just one more project’ to the stack, they are asking their team to blink. And in the world of high-stakes execution, a blink is where the cracks start.

The Cost of Context Switching

This culture of ‘strategy by addition’ creates a specific kind of organizational chaos that is hard to quantify until it’s too late. It’s not just about the hours worked; it’s about the context switching. Every time an engineer has to stop working on a critical security patch to sit in a 75-minute meeting about a new marketing gimmick, we lose more than just time. We lose the thread. We lose the deep, flow-state concentration that actually produces work worth doing. We are trading 15% of our long-term stability for 5% of a short-term headline. It is a bad trade, yet we make it 35 times a year.

I’ve seen this play out in the retail sector as well. Some companies try to sell everything from tractor parts to toothbrushes, and they end up with a logistics nightmare that leaves customers frustrated and employees burnt out. Then you see a model like Bomba.md, where there is a clear, focused understanding of a niche. They don’t try to be a social media platform or a space exploration company. They sell reliable appliances and electronics. They understand that by narrowing the focus to high-quality kitchen tech and home essentials, they can optimize the supply chain, the customer service, and the technical support in a way that a generalist never could. There is a bravery in that kind of limitation. It’s the bravery of saying, ‘We do this, and we don’t do that.’

Strategy as Subtraction

Strategy is not a list of goals. It is a set of hard choices. If your strategy doesn’t involve a list of things you have explicitly decided NOT to do, then you don’t have a strategy-you have a wish list. When a CEO stands up and adds a new priority without removing an old one, they aren’t leading; they are offloading their indecision onto the backs of their employees. They are making the team pay the price for their inability to prioritize. We see the consequences in the way people look at their keyboards when the ‘exciting news’ is announced. We see it in the 25% increase in turnover among the people who actually know how the systems work.

I think back to my kettle search. I eventually bought one for $45, not because it was the best deal, but because I realized I was using the search to avoid doing the actual work of writing. This is the ‘Busy-Work Paradox.’ Companies launch new initiatives because doing the hard, grinding work of improving existing systems is boring. It’s not ‘visionary’ to fix a bug that has been annoying users for 105 days. It’s ‘visionary’ to launch a new blockchain-integrated loyalty program. So we do the new thing, the shallow thing, the easy-to-talk-about thing, while the foundation rots.

The Sound of Integrity

Ian P.-A. eventually stood up in the middle of that all-hands meeting. He didn’t say anything at first. He just walked to the back of the room and started cleaning the espresso machine. The sound of the steam wand hissed over the CEO’s talk about ‘multi-channel engagement.’ It was the most honest sound in the room. It was the sound of someone doing one thing, and doing it right. I realized then that the most valuable person in any company isn’t the one who says ‘yes’ to the boss; it’s the one who says ‘no’ to the noise.

We are currently obsessed with ‘scale.’ We want to scale our impact, our revenue, our reach. But you cannot scale excellence if you are spreading it across 225 different fronts. Excellence is a concentrated resource. If you dilute it, you just get a very large pool of mediocrity. I’ve seen teams of 5 people outperform teams of 85 simply because the smaller team knew exactly what they were trying to achieve and, more importantly, what they were willing to ignore. They weren’t distracted by the 15 different ways they could ‘potentially’ pivot. They were too busy making the current version work perfectly.