Are you pursuing too many strategic goals?
Many organizations do. Not because they lack ambition, but because they struggle to make the hard choices that strategy demands. The reality is that most strategies fail, not due to a lack of good ideas, but because of too many ideas.
Strategy isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing less, with greater impact. The key is to ruthlessly sacrifice good goals to focus on the best ones. A powerful way to enforce this discipline is through an anti-goal list.
The concept is straightforward: to define what something is, first clarify what it isn’t. Silence, for example, is best understood as the absence of noise. The same principle applies to strategy.
To build an anti-goal list, start with the Iron Law of Project Sacrifice: Any initiative can be good, fast, or cost-effective, but never all three. You can optimize two. The third must be sacrificed.
Now, apply this to your strategic goals. Imagine your strategic goal is to build new assets to facilitate growth:
- High-quality assets, built quickly → It won’t be cheap. Anti-goal: minimizing cost.
- High-quality, cost-effective assets → It will take time. Anti-goal: speed.
- Fast, cost-effective assets → Quality will suffer. Anti-goal: maximizing quality.
By defining what not to prioritize, you create the clarity needed for exceptional execution. The anti-goal list is an underrated weapon: It gives high-performing leaders an almost unfair advantage.
What’s on yours?