What Living Out of a Suitcase Taught Me About Running a Better Organization
Remove decision fatigue
Every time my family moved internationally - and we moved more than once - there was a period in between where all of our belongings were in transit somewhere on a container ship.
During those weeks, we lived in furnished temporary accommodation. Six of everything in the kitchen. The basics in pots and pans. A few simple pieces of furniture. Just enough clothes to get through. No clutter. No extras. Nothing that hadn't earned its place.
Something unexpected happened in those periods. Despite the stress of a major career transition - a new country, a new role, a new school for the kids - I had some of the clearest thinking of my career. The mental clutter was gone. Decision fatigue dropped. The hard problems got easier to focus on because there was nothing trivial competing for attention.
It took me a while to connect what was happening. The simplicity of the environment was creating space. And that space was the thing.
That is the principle behind Simplify Aggressively, the second step in the turnaround work we do at Leadership In Focus. And it is the one most leaders resist the longest.
Complexity almost always arrives disguised as ambition.
In 2006, Ford owned Volvo, Jaguar, Land Rover, a significant stake in Mazda, Mercury, and Ford itself. When the market turned and resources became stretched, the organization couldn't bear the weight of fixing what ailed each company, let alone invest properly in any of them.
Steve Jobs faced the same problem at Apple in 1997: twelve weeks from bankruptcy, with a product line so fragmented that even insiders couldn't explain what the company made or who it was for. He didn't launch anything. He didn't announce a new strategy. He cut. The entire line was simplified down to four products: consumer and professional, desktop and portable. Everything else was eliminated.
Within a year, Apple was profitable.
There is also a story in Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs that captures what this actually feels like inside a leadership team. Jobs gathered his team for an offsite strategy session. They spent days working through the list, debating, consolidating, arguing. By the end, they were proud of what they had produced. They thought they had done the hard work.
Jobs picked up a marker and crossed out everything except the top four.
The room erupted. People had poured themselves into those projects. They had arguments ready, data ready, reputations attached to what he had just eliminated in a single stroke.
Jobs was unmoved. An organization that tries to do ten things exceptionally cannot. It will do ten things adequately. And adequacy wasn't going to save Apple.
I have seen the same dynamic with our clients.
When we worked with a construction company navigating steel tariffs, labour shortages, and a service offering that had grown in too many directions at once, the only viable path was to focus, and focus fast. We helped them define exactly who they were and what they were not. That clarity allowed them to identify the core services they could do exceptionally well, wind down what was consuming resources without proportional return, and ultimately position the business for a successful acquisition shortly after.
You do not simplify to shrink. You simplify to become capable of growing again.
Three things you can do this week.
Map your complexity. List every initiative your team is currently working on, every one. Then ask each leader to rank them by actual strategic value, not political value or sunk cost. The gap between those two lists is where your complexity lives.
Audit your meetings. For every recurring meeting in the next month, ask one question: does this produce a decision or an update? If the honest answer is an update, that meeting is a candidate for the list.
Build a Stop Doing list. Name one thing your organization should stop doing, not gradually wind down, but actually stop. Give it an owner and a date. The discipline of that single act will tell you more about your organization's readiness to change than any strategy session.
Clarity to execute
Back in those temporary apartments between international moves, I didn't miss what wasn't there. I just had more capacity for what mattered.
That is what simplification does for an organization. It does not make you smaller. It makes you clearer. And clarity, it turns out, is exactly what execution needs to actually work.
If your organization is carrying more than it can effectively do, we should talk.
Leadership In Focus works with leadership teams to cut through the complexity and build organizations that can execute with focus and discipline.
