Leaders should do the most important things exceptionally well, contends LINUS OKORIE

Every successful leader faces a dangerous temptation that if something is good, more of it must be better. When they see the revenue growing, they push for faster growth. As the market share expands, they expand into adjacent markets. They launch more product lines because existing products are selling. This relentless pursuit of “more” feels like ambition is often the beginning of the end.

This is where companies move from doing a few things exceptionally well to doing many things mediocrely. And it almost always starts with leadership decisions that seem brilliant at the time but prove devastating in hindsight.

There is a critical difference between growth and scale. Growth aligned with core strengths builds sustainable advantage. Undisciplined expansion destroys it. Yet research shows that 67% of companies that fail do so not from lack of opportunity but from pursuing too many opportunities simultaneously. Companies launch products outside their area of expertise. They acquire businesses in unfamiliar industries. They expand geographically before mastering their home market. The strategic clarity and focus that defined their early success gets replaced.

Between 2001 and 2017, General Electric under Jeff Immelt expanded aggressively into finance, entertainment, and other sectors far from its industrial core. The company made over 380 acquisitions during this period. By 2018, GE’s market value fell from $400 billion to less than $100 billion. The pursuit of more had destroyed three-quarters of shareholder value. Quibi, the short-form video streaming service raised $1.75 billion and shut down after just six months in 2020. Despite having no proven product-market fit, they pursued massive content deals, extensive marketing campaigns, and rapid scaling. The undisciplined pursuit of growth killed the company before it could find its footing.

Under Adam Neumann, WeWork went beyond co-working spaces, into co-living apartments, schools, banking, and even airlines. In nine years, the company had 600 spaces globally. His undisciplined expansion led to its valuation plummeting from $47 billion to less than $10 billion in months, eventually filing for bankruptcy in 2023. Neumann himself acknowledged that the $47 billion valuation went to his head, a perfect illustration of how undisciplined pursuit of more destroys.

Leaders create the conditions for undisciplined pursuit of more through identifiable behaviors, and understanding these patterns is the first step toward avoiding them. Many leaders treat growth as the primary measure of success rather than as one indicator among many. They celebrate revenue increases without examining profit margins, tout expansion into new markets without assessing strategic fit, and measure activity rather than impact. Data reveals that 78% of major corporate growth initiatives fail to deliver expected returns, yet companies continue launching them at an accelerating pace. This is because leaders have made growth itself the goal rather than a byproduct of doing something valuable exceptionally well.

In the early stages of success, most organizations maintain clear boundaries about what they will and won’t do. They understand their core competencies and stick to them. But as success builds, these boundaries start to blur. Leaders begin saying yes to opportunities that would have rejected a few years earlier.

Undisciplined leaders pursue bigness for its own sake. They want to be in more markets, have more products, serve more customers, generate more revenue. But they neglect the unglamorous work of strengthening core operations, improving quality, building better systems, and developing deeper capabilities. A study of 1,850 companies found that those focused on operational excellence and improvements outperformed those pursuing dramatic expansion by 300% over fifteen years. The tortoise will eventually win because the hare is only interested in drama.

As organizations pursue undisciplined growth, they become more complex with more products, more markets, more processes, more layers of management. Leaders often point to this complexity as justification for declining performance, which is not true. Southwest Airlines serves millions of customers with remarkable simplicity. Amazon has extraordinary scale but maintains intense focus on customer experience fundamentals.

In undisciplined organizations, busyness becomes a badge of honor. Leaders brag about how many initiatives they are running or how many meetings they are in. But research consistently shows that the damage from undisciplined growth is not always immediately visible in financial statements, which is why it is so dangerous. By the time declining performance becomes obvious, the problems are deeply embedded. Perhaps most dangerously, undisciplined pursuit of more means your limited resources get spread across too many priorities. The mathematical reality shows that when everything is important, nothing is important.

If undisciplined pursuit of more is a leadership problem, the solution must also come from leadership. The most successful leaders can articulate in one sentence what their organization does better than anyone else in the world. Everything else is either in service of that core strength or a distraction. Creating what some call a “stop-doing list” becomes essential, a catalog of opportunities you will deliberately not pursue regardless of how attractive they appear.

Before pursuing any new opportunity, leaders need to ask these questions: Does this strengthen our core capabilities? Does this align with our long-term strategic direction? If the answer to any question is no, walking away is the right choice regardless of how lucrative the opportunity appears. The discipline of having clear criteria aids decision-making.

Revenue and growth are easy to measure, but they are lagging indicators (e.g., monthly sales) that tell you what already happened rather than what is coming. Leaders in this phase of decline often make the critical mistake of overestimating these indicators and using them to predict future success, assuming that because revenue grew 30% last year, it will continue growing at similar rates indefinitely. When you use lagging indicators to predict the future, you are essentially driving forward while looking in the rearview mirror; you will eventually crash.

Don’t rely on willpower to maintain discipline; build it into your systems. Some companies limit the number of strategic initiatives they will fund. Others require that for every new project approved, an existing one must be eliminated. This removes the burden from individual willpower and makes discipline institutional.

At least annually, every organization should revisit fundamental questions: Why do we exist? What value do we create that no one else can? Are our current activities aligned with that purpose? Companies that conduct regular strategic reviews focused on alignment rather than just performance are more likely to maintain focus.

The power of this approach is best illustrated by Steve Jobs when he returned to Apple in 1997. The company was ninety days from insolvency, losing over $1 billion annually, with market share collapsed from 16% to 4%. Apple had been making twelve different versions of the Macintosh to satisfy retailers’ requests. Jobs famously reduced the entire product line to just four products. The reasoning was with just four products, so they could put their A team on every single one. Within a year, Apple went from losing $1.04 billion to making a $309 million profit. Jobs saved Apple by ruthlessly focusing on less done exceptionally well.

Undisciplined pursuit of more is about fear. Fear of missing out. Fear that saying no means accepting limits. But leaders must understand that strategy is fundamentally about choice, and choice requires sacrifice. Your role is not to do more things but to do the most important things exceptionally well.

Companies fail not because they lacked opportunities but because they lacked the courage to choose among them. In a world that constantly demands more, the leadership decision to deliberately pursue less but pursue it with excellence is both radical and essential. The question isn’t whether you can do more. The question is whether you should. And more often than not, the answer is no.

 Okorie MFR is a leadership development expert spanning 30 years in the research, teaching and coaching of leadership in Africa and across the world. He is the CEO of the GOTNI Leadership Centre