Stopping things is a form of strategy. The most underrated one.

When people talk about strategy, in companies, they almost always talk about things to start. New initiatives, new markets, new products, new channels, new partnerships. The strategic conversation by definition is a conversation of addition. There’s a plan for next year, and that plan is a list of what we’ll do more of, or new.

Almost never is the strategic conversation symmetrical. Almost never, alongside the list of things to start, is there an equally serious list of things to stop. And yet, in many companies I’ve watched up close, the list of things to stop would produce more value than the list of things to start.

Stopping is the most underrated form of strategy I know. Underrated because it doesn’t produce exciting slides, doesn’t generate lively discussion in meetings, doesn’t present well in front of a board. But it’s exactly in deciding what to stop that many companies recover the clarity they need.

Things to stop, in a typical company, usually fall into four categories. Initiatives started years ago for a reason that’s no longer valid, but that keep going on organisational inertia. Products or services on the price list that generate marginal revenue but eat a lot of operational meeting time. Company rituals (weekly meetings, monthly reports) that no one really reads, but that no one dares to cancel first. Customers who pay little and ask a lot, who get tolerated to avoid losing the relationship.

Each of these categories, on its own, looks negligible. Cancelling a weekly meeting, a secondary product, a difficult customer, doesn’t seem to move the numbers in any significant way. Added up, these decisions change the quality of an entire company’s work.

You see this clearly in a concrete example. A services firm I was following had, for three years, a service line B generating 12% of revenue and 35% of senior people’s time. Line B had been born to serve a market that, in the meantime, had shrunk. The remaining customers were loyal but asked for a lot of customisation. When I proposed shutting down line B, the first reaction was refusal. It’s 12% of revenue, we can’t afford it. When we calmly looked at what that 12% cost in senior time, in real margin, in distraction from line A which was growing 30% a year, the conversation changed. Six months later line B was closed, with an orderly transition path for the remaining customers. The next year, line A grew 47%. It wasn’t a coincidence. It was the consequence of the best people finally having time to push it for real.

The interesting thing is that, afterwards, no one in the company missed line B. Everyone, in retrospect, said we should have closed it two years earlier. But for two years, the idea of closing it hadn’t even reached the table. It was perceived as a giving-up, not as a strategic choice.

This is the point. Stopping things is harder psychologically than operationally. Operationally, closing a line, cancelling a meeting, saying thanks to a customer who isn’t working anymore, are contained acts. Psychologically, they require accepting that this thing, today, isn’t the right choice anymore. Accepting it means, implicitly, admitting that at some point you kept doing something that didn’t make sense anymore. Few people want to admit it, especially about choices they themselves made.

There’s a specific resistance to stopping that shows up as caution. Let’s not close it completely, let’s keep it as an option. Let’s downsize it, let’s see how it goes. The compromise looks reasonable, in reality it’s the worst choice. It doesn’t recover either the resources or the attention, and it keeps the confusion alive. Stopping halfway is almost always worse than stopping completely.

I tell this often to leadership teams who say we don’t have enough time for the new things. Almost never is the problem time itself. Almost always the problem is that time is already taken by old things no one ever declared closed. Adding is easy. Stopping takes courage.

When working on annual strategy, a practice that almost always works is dedicating a quarter of the time not to what you want to start, but to what you want to stop. The conversation is more uncomfortable. But it’s also where the choices end up that, after twelve months, will turn out to be the ones that really made the difference.

It isn’t about doing less. It’s about stopping doing what doesn’t matter. That distinction changes everything.