Question for leaders. What is on your Kill List?

8 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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1:19

In this short leadership talk, the speaker argues that effective leaders should focus less on adding new initiatives and more on stopping low‑value, unprofitable, or stagnant activities that clutter an organization. He describes how corporate clutter—such as zombie products, outdated reports, and pet projects—drains resources, often persisting because of sentimental attachment or the sunk‑cost fallacy. The speaker stresses that eliminating these activities requires courage, as it invites internal resistance and forces leaders to admit past mistakes. To operationalize this, he recommends that leaders maintain a "to‑kill" list alongside their to‑do list, using it to systematically identify and cut waste, thereby freeing resources for higher‑value, profitable ventures.

Chapters

Many leaders are focused on addition. What can we add? What new initiatives can we start? What markets can we enter? What product lines can we expand? But the true test of leadership is not what you start, it's what you stop. Because organizations accumulate clutter, corporate clutter, zombie innovation products that aren't going anywhere, unprofitable lines, old reports, old activities that don't add any value. And what you've got to do is eliminate those. And very often poor value products have historical or sentimental attachments, somebody's pet project, or there's the sunk cost fallacy. We've spent so much on this project already, we've got to continue pouring more resources into it. But the true leader will eliminate those low, low value activities in order to release resources for profitable, high value ventures. And this takes courage because you will face internal resistance, you'll get some opposition, you have to admit that we got some things wrong, and that's not easy to do. But it's really important so that you can release the resources which can then be used for more useful activities. My advice is this: in addition to your to-do list, start a to-kill list.