We talk about prioritizing like it’s a badge of leadership. But strategic leadership involves far more than what you place at the top of your list; equally important is what you choose to chop, or stop.
As Rose Hollister and Michael Watkins wrote in Harvard Business Review several years ago, “If ‘the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do,’ as Michael Porter famously said … the essence of execution is truly not doing it. That sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly hard for organizations to kill existing initiatives, even when they don’t align with new strategies.”
Deprioritizing means deciding, consciously and publicly, that something that once mattered now matters less. It’s ending—or at least shrinking—initiatives into which you’ve already sunk money, time, and pride. It’s turning to colleagues who’ve given their weekends to a project and telling them their effort will now go kerplunk.
If that sounds like emotional heavy lifting, it is. But leaders who excel here don’t just rely on gut instinct and personal capital. They draw on a body of research—spanning military strategy, behavioral economics, and portfolio governance—that informs how to do it well. Here are some examples.
Don’t Just Cut, Reframe The Risk Equation
In the early 20th century, Britain faced a problem: Its global commitments stretched from the North Sea to the Pacific, but Germany’s rising naval power posed an existential threat closer to home. British strategists didn’t try to defend everything equally. They accepted more risk in far-flung territories—pulling back ships and personnel—so they could concentrate force in European waters.
Whether in the military or business, deprioritizing often means increasing the acceptable level of risk in secondary areas. Large companies do this all the time.
In recent months, for example, several prominent companies have been scaling back or fully exiting their operations and expansion plans in Latin America. UnitedHealth Group, the U.S.-based healthcare giant, announced that it’s exiting the region to refocus on the domestic market, following recent heavy losses. Canada’s Scotiabank is pulling back to refocus on more-profitable North American markets, after a decade-long expansion into Latin America. And Telefónica, the Spanish telecommunications giant, has been systematically scaling back its presence in Latin America.
None of this is meant to suggest that Latin America is a bad economic bet. What it does confirm is that there are times and circumstances when leaders need to reprioritize—and if that means reducing exposure in one market to focus more heavily on another, they do it.
The key isn’t to minimize risk everywhere. It’s to define the “safe to lose” thresholds in deprioritized areas, and design guardrails to contain damage within those limits. That reframes the decision from “What are we giving up?” to “What are we willing to risk to protect the top prize?”
Set Your “Kill Criteria” Early
In 2016, a European telecom poured millions of Euros into a next-gen streaming platform. The product repeatedly missed internal launch targets. Leadership kept it alive, hoping it would turn the corner the next quarter. It didn’t.
This is the “escalation of commitment trap,” described by Columbia University’s Joel Brockner as “the tendency of decision makers to persist with failing courses of action.”
Portfolio management research says the best organizations fight this tendency by setting kill criteria before a project starts—and, importantly, making those criteria public. In one experiment, projects with pre-socialized exit triggers (If two milestones are missed, we shut down.) were terminated twice as quickly as those without. Why? Because ending them was following the plan, not making an emotional judgment.
Forget Sunk Costs, Focus On The Future
An international nonprofit faced a painful decision: which health programs to fund when donor contributions dropped. When leaders looked at the current roster, every program had champions, and every cut felt impossible.
So, the board chair asked a different question: If you had the full budget and the ability to start afresh today, how would you allocate the funds? That exercise, drawn from behavioral economics research, bypassed sunk cost bias, the tendency to continue something in which you’ve invested money, effort, or time. The exercise found that two programs—beloved but less impactful—wouldn’t have been started today. Those were deprioritized.
Running frequent clean-slate allocation drills, or resetting priorities through zero-based budgeting, forces teams to think forward, not backward. It’s not “What should we take away?”—it’s “What would we build if we started from zero?” The answers are often bracingly different.
Reward the Removers, Not Just the Builders
Everyone wants to be known as the leader who launched something big. Killing a project, even a struggling one, is usually seen as a failure. At a large company, this can result in a ballooning portfolio of half-finished, underperforming efforts.
At one company I know (a software firm), a culture change program reframed sunsetting projects as “returning resources to the core mission.” Managers who proposed high-value cuts got visible credit in all-hands meetings.
The result: people stopped hiding struggling projects. They started competing to be the ones who freed up resources for the company’s most important bets.
The hardest thing about letting-go isn’t knowing what to cut. It’s designing the conditions—risk reframing, early triggers, cultural credit, and so forth—that make cutting the natural, rational outcome of the system you’ve built, rather than an act of willpower.
Leaders who master this don’t just prune their to-do list. They reengineer their organization’s relationship with risk, with legacy, and with prestige. And that’s what makes space for the kind of focus that changes outcomes.