Watch a leadership team set priorities for the year and you will see a well-run process. Discussion. Debate. Real thought about what matters. A short list at the end, usually 3 or 4 priorities, and genuine commitment to it. Now watch the same team a year later. The list of the work that was prioritized has five things on it. Nobody remembers when the fourth and fifth arrived, and nobody removed anything to make room. That is the subtraction problem, and it is nearly universal

Ask a leader how they ended up spending their week and you will not hear about a mistake. You will hear about a sequence of reasonable decisions. A client needed something adjacent to what the company does, and the revenue was real, so they took it. Someone left and the gap got covered from the top, just until they hired, and then hiring got hard or training the new person got pushed off because of ‘busy.’ A customer asked for something and it became a product line nobody wan