Page 98 - Harvard Business Review, Sep/Oct 2018

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How to deal with ROSE HOLLISTER
Executive coach and consultant,
initiative overload Genesis Advisers
MICHAEL D. WATKINS
Cofounder, Genesis Advisers, and
professor, IMD

Too

Many

Projects

i�

“the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do,”
as Michael Porter famously said in a seminal HBR ar-
ticle, then 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. Instead, leaders
keep layering on initiatives, which can lead to severe
overload at levels below the executive team.

SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2018 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW 65