Here’s the counterintuitive truth about growth: most companies kill themselves by doing more, not less.
When teams face challenges, the instinct is always to add something—more features, more processes, more initiatives. It feels productive. It looks like progress. And it’s usually wrong.
William Strunk had it right in The Elements of Style: “Omit needless words.” In business, the parallel is “Omit needless activities.” But here’s what most leaders miss—you can’t identify what’s needless until you have systems that show you what actually matters.
People think systems create complexity, but they’re backwards. Real systems thinking forces simplification by making the essential visible and the clutter obvious.
Look at what these leaders did:
Steve Jobs when he returned to Apple, he didn’t add more products—he stripped 350 products down to about 10 major lines.
Andrew Carnegie sold off every business that wasn’t steel.
Jeff Bezos built Amazon’s entire culture around saying “no” to 99% of opportunities.
Compare that to companies that let their gardens grow wild. BlackBerry tried to compete on apps, touchscreens, and tablets instead of mastering secure messaging. Yahoo became a sprawling mess of search, email, news, and social instead of dominating one thing. Both choked on their own complexity.
The difference? The simplifiers had systems that revealed what drove value. The complexity addicts just kept planting without weeding.
Netflix killed their profitable DVD business to focus purely on streaming. Southwest Airlines flies one aircraft type while competitors juggle multiple models. In-N-Out never expanded their simple menu despite decades of pressure.
They understood something most leaders don’t: concentration creates value, but you can’t concentrate without first simplifying. And you can’t simplify without systems that show you what’s actually essential versus what’s just accumulated over time.
When you systematize a complex process, you break it into modules and identify the real levers of control. That’s when the needless activities become obvious—they’re the ones that don’t move the levers that matter.
Want to grow? Start subtracting. But build the systems first, or you’ll be weeding blind.