How can a company with extraordinary talent, groundbreaking ideas and seemingly unlimited resources fail to deliver on its vision?
That question was on my mind while reading David Epstein’s Inside the Box: How Constraints Make us Better.
One of the opening stories is about General Magic, a Silicon Valley company that envisioned handheld computing, digital assistants, app ecosystems, maps and many of the technologies we now take for granted, years before they were possible. The company attracted remarkable engineers, many of whom would later lead some of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies. Investor enthusiasm was so high that General Magic became one of the first true “concept IPOs,” meaning that it went public on an idea.
Despite all of that, General Magic was a commercial failure. Extraordinary vision and extraordinary talent proved insufficient on their own. Generating possibilities and realizing them are two very different leadership challenges.
The Problem of Too Many Good Ideas
From the outside it appeared to have everything, but General Magic’s story reflects a broader truth. Many organizations, from start-ups to global conglomerates, don’t struggle to generate ideas. If anything, they struggle with the opposite. Success creates a constant stream of worthwhile opportunities competing for the organization’s attention.
Growth creates opportunities. New products. New markets. New customer requests. New internal initiatives.
Success creates opportunities faster than organizations create capacity.
People still have the same number of hours in a day. Managers can only lead so many initiatives well. Employees can only absorb so much change before priorities begin competing with one another.
The more successful an organization becomes, the more disciplined it must become about choosing where to focus.
Declarations Are Easy. Tradeoffs Are Hard.
This sounds easy enough, but it’s often difficult in practice. It starts by understanding the distinction between a declaration and a tradeoff.
A declaration says, “This matters.”
A tradeoff says, “This matters more.”
Across teams and organizations, adding another worthwhile priority is rarely the hard part. The real work is translating declarations into tradeoffs: the tough conversation that begins when someone asks, “Okay, so what’s getting less of our attention and resources if we add this priority?”
Clarity comes by thinking of your organization as a multi-dimensional cube. Each of the cube’s sides represents a different system within your organization—interconnected parts of a whole, with strategy always at the center. Tradeoffs should be made in a way that enables strategy, with a careful eye on how choices made in one area can reinforce—or disrupt—alignment in another.
The conversations around tradeoffs are rarely easy, but remember: organizations don’t struggle because they lack good ideas. They struggle because every declaration competes with every previous declaration unless leaders make the tradeoffs explicit.
The Overlooked Constraint
When leaders talk about organizational constraints, the conversation usually centers on budgets, staffing, technology or capacity. Those are all real.
Another constraint is just as important: leadership attention.
Every new priority requires leadership attention. Managers spend time explaining it. Teams spend time learning it. Employees spend time figuring out how it fits alongside everything else they’re expected to accomplish.
None of that appears on a balance sheet. Yet leadership attention is every bit as finite as financial capital.
In my experience, execution rarely falters because people don’t care or aren’t capable. More often, it falters because too many worthwhile priorities compete for the same leadership attention.
Leadership attention is expressed in practical ways: what leaders ask about in meetings, what appears on scorecards, what receives recognition and what is revisited week after week. Those signals tell the organization what truly matters. When too many priorities compete for those same signals, even strong strategies begin to lose clarity.
What distinguishes organizations that are inundated with new priorities from those that successfully translate strategy into execution is the presence of leaders who consistently make tradeoffs, reinforce focus and protect alignment.
This is where the role of an Alignment Leader® becomes critical. As we describe in our Executive Guide, Becoming an Alignment Leader, an Alignment Leader is someone who:
- Speaks the language of choices and tradeoffs
- Champions choices that enable strategy
- Protects emerging processes and structures while keeping the business running
Most importantly, the Alignment Leader understands that until you’ve defined the “nos,” you don’t really have a strategy—you have a wish list.
Declarations have a cost. Every declaration consumes a little more of an organization’s finite leadership attention. Tradeoffs determine whether that attention is directed by design or dispersed by default.
One Question Worth Asking
General Magic’s story isn’t an argument against ambition. It’s a reminder that every organization has more good ideas than it can pursue.
The next time your team introduces an exciting new priority, pause before asking, “How do we fit this in?”
Instead, ask: “What will receive less of our attention and resources, so this has a real chance to succeed?”
Every declaration has a price. The price isn’t just budget or headcount. It’s leadership attention. It’s management capacity. It’s organizational focus.
Every organization has a strategy. The question is whether its attention reflects it.
