Across boardrooms in Frankfurt, London, and Singapore, the same pressure is being felt with increasing urgency: the need to act faster. Supply chain volatility, AI disruption, shifting trade architecture, and compressed competitive cycles have made speed a strategic imperative in a way that feels qualitatively different from previous eras. The response from most executive teams has been predictable, more initiatives, more resources spread across more priorities, more pressure on already stretched organisations to simply do more.
It isn’t working. And the math explains why.
The Efficiency Trap
The dominant theory of corporate performance improvement has long been additive: identify underperforming functions, apply resources and oversight, improve them. Repeat across the enterprise. The assumption is that aggregate improvement compounds meaningfully at the organisational level.
It doesn’t, at least not reliably, and not at the rate that competitive pressure now demands.
Consider what happens when an organisation improves ten different activities by ten percent each. In aggregate, they’ve generated roughly one additional unit of total output, the equivalent of one extra employee’s contribution spread across an entire year. Useful, but not transformational. Not the kind of improvement that bends a growth curve or rebuilds a margin structure.
Now consider a different approach: identify the two or three activities that genuinely drive competitive advantage, and multiply improvement efforts there. A twenty percent efficiency gain on those activities combined with a twenty percent increase in structured time devoted to them yields a forty-four percent improvement before a single additional pound, euro, or dollar has been spent. Add a strategic concentration of resources, shifting eighty percent of organisational focus onto the twenty percent of activities that determine competitive position, and the compound effect becomes transformational, not incremental.
This is not a theoretical exercise. It is a mathematical description of how certain organisations are pulling away from their industries right now, while competitors with comparable balance sheets and talent pools stagnate.
What Geopolitical Turbulence Actually Demands of Leaders
The conventional narrative about uncertainty, that it demands caution, consensus, and thorough information-gathering before action, has quietly become one of the most expensive assumptions in executive strategy. Research examining the quality of strategic decisions finds a counterintuitive result: decision quality peaks when approximately sixty to seventy percent of ideal information is available, then flattens or declines as information-gathering continues. The opportunity cost of the additional time required to reach ninety percent certainty almost always exceeds the marginal improvement in decision quality.
This has direct implications for how organisations should respond to the current environment. When trade policies shift overnight, when a competitor makes an unexpected acquisition, when a supply chain disruption materialises in a geography that carried no apparent risk six months ago, the organisations that respond within days have structurally different outcomes from those that respond within weeks. Not because they have better information. Because they have built decision architecture that doesn’t require it.
The companies gaining ground in volatile conditions share a characteristic that is less about culture and more about structure: they have created explicit decision rights frameworks that eliminate the committee review processes responsible for most organisational latency. They have established what might be described as a bias toward seventy percent, making consequential decisions with seventy percent of ideal information and seventy percent confidence in outcome, accepting that the speed of the learning cycle matters more than the quality of any single decision.
This is not impulsiveness dressed in strategic language. It is a disciplined recognition that in conditions of genuine uncertainty, the ability to act, learn, and adjust faster than competitors creates advantages that accumulate geometrically. The organisation that makes ten imperfect decisions and learns from them outperforms the one that makes three perfect decisions and waits for the fourth.
The Focus Imperative: Why Doing Less Is the Hardest Strategic Choice
If the mathematics of multiplicative improvement are straightforward, why don’t more organisations apply them? The answer lies in what elimination requires of leadership.
To concentrate eighty percent of resources on the twenty percent of activities that drive competitive advantage, you must first make the decision to reduce investment in everything else. This is where strategy typically breaks down. The diversification instinct, the belief that broad activity reduces risk, is deeply embedded in most corporate cultures. So is the political reality that reducing investment in any function generates resistance from the people whose identities are tied to it.
The result is what might be called organisational noise: a large number of active priorities receiving roughly equal attention, where the critical few activities that genuinely determine whether the company wins or loses are competing for resources with activities that are, at best, hygiene factors and, at worst, active distractions.
The most important strategic decision most executive teams need to make right now is not what to add but what to stop. Not which new markets to enter but which current activities to exit, deprioritise, or systematically wind down. The discipline of subtraction, identifying the bottom twenty to thirty percent of SKUs, customers, geographies, and initiatives that consume resources without meaningfully contributing to competitive position, and eliminating them, consistently produces larger performance improvements than any additive strategy.
A manufacturer that reduces its product portfolio from three hundred SKUs to one hundred and twenty, redirecting the freed capacity toward its highest-margin product lines, does not lose twenty percent of its value. It gains the focus required to become extraordinary at the things that matter. This is not a theoretical claim. It describes a documented pattern across multiple industrial transformation case studies, including frameworks detailed at stagnationassassins.com, where the consequences of portfolio sprawl on margin structure are particularly well-evidenced.
The Sustainability Constraint: Intensity Without Burnout
One dimension of this argument requires careful handling, because it is frequently misunderstood. The argument for concentrated intensity, working harder on fewer, higher-leverage activities, is sometimes read as an argument for unsustainable pressure on people and organisations. It is not.
The research on sustained high performance is actually quite precise on this point: performance peaks at approximately fifty hours of structured weekly effort, with rapid degradation beyond that threshold. Organisations that have attempted to drive results through broad intensity increases, pushing people to do more of everything faster, have consistently experienced turnover spikes of forty to sixty percent, destroying more value than the intensity created. The people most likely to leave under unsustainable pressure are, reliably, the highest performers with the most options.
The resolution of this apparent paradox is that focus and intensity are sequential, not simultaneous. The correct order is: establish priorities, eliminate low-value work, then, and only then, increase effort on the activities that remain. When people work harder on things that genuinely matter, within sustainable boundaries, the combination of intrinsic motivation and structural focus produces results that no amount of diffuse pressure can replicate.
A detailed mathematical treatment of how these variables interact in this article about the Karelin Method.
Implications for Global Leaders
The competitive landscape facing European and global business leaders over the next three to five years will not reward incremental improvement. It will reward structural clarity, organisations that know precisely what they are best at, have made the difficult decisions to stop doing everything else, and have built the decision architecture to act on that clarity faster than their competitors can respond.
The velocity paradox is this: the organisations that appear to be moving fastest are not the ones doing the most. They are the ones that have made the hardest organisational choice available, the choice to stop, and then concentrated the full force of their capability on the activities where they are genuinely, measurably, and defensibly superior.
That is what winning looks like in the current environment. Not breadth. Not urgency distributed equally across a sprawling initiative portfolio. Precision, concentration, and the courage to let everything else wait.
