Priority has lost all meaning in most organizations. When everything becomes urgent, important, and “top priority,” the word becomes strategically useless.
Think about a traffic intersection. The cars on the through street have priority. At an airport, traffic controllers tell pilots which aircraft has priority. The concept only works because most things don’t have priority at the same time.
Yet most leadership teams operate as if they’re managing an intersection where every direction has the right of way simultaneously. The result? Strategic gridlock.
I’ve been wrestling with this personally. My weekly task list hit 109 items last week. Everything felt critical, urgent, or “high impact.” But when I dig into the history of how successful leaders actually operated, the contrast is stark.
Charles Schwab, president of Bethlehem Steel Corporation, brought in consultant Ivy Lee to help his executives become more productive. Lee’s solution was radical in its simplicity: list just six things that must be done tomorrow. Six. That level of focus helped Schwab’s company achieve massive productivity gains.
Modern leaders have convinced themselves this kind of discipline isn’t possible anymore. The world moves too fast. The challenges are too complex. Everything really is important.
That’s fear talking, not strategy.
The brutal truth is that most leaders avoid choosing because choosing requires courage. When you declare three priorities, you’re implicitly saying everything else can wait. That creates FOMO, political resistance, and the uncomfortable possibility that you’re wrong.
But here’s what I’ve observed in teams that actually make progress: most challenges are interrelated, and there’s usually one challenge that, if resolved, makes the others more manageable or irrelevant entirely. The strategic work is identifying that unlock challenge and having the discipline to focus there.
This requires what I call battlefield courage. Military leaders understand that you can’t fight effectively on multiple fronts simultaneously. You choose your battles based on which victory opens up the most strategic advantage.
Business leaders understand this intellectually but struggle with the execution. They want to hedge their bets, keep all options open, and avoid the political cost of saying no to important stakeholders.
The most effective leaders I’ve studied make a different choice. They pick their top three priorities and commit for 18-24 months. Not forever, but long enough to make real progress. They park everything else deliberately, with review dates, and they get their teams to commit to the same discipline.
This isn’t about ignoring important work. It’s about accepting that sustained focus on the most critical challenges produces better outcomes than scattered attention across all challenges.
When senior leaders don’t create crisp priorities, they force everyone else to fight it out on the ground. Teams waste energy on political battles over resources instead of progress on challenges.
The companies that win understand that priority means superiority, not equality. They have the courage to choose battles wisely rather than fighting everything simultaneously.
What would happen if you reduced your priority list from everything to three things? What unlock challenge would you choose if you could only focus on one?