Dev Patnaik
Executives must cut through strategy clutter by focusing on 5 big strategic priorities. This focus drives clarity, empowers leadership, and fuels growth in dynamic business environments, securing a sustainable competitive advantage.
We’re well into February, and people are still saying “Happy New Year” to me. That says everything about how fast-moving and chaotic the start of 2025 has been.
The unprecedented Los Angeles fire disaster together with the norm-shattering political upheaval in Washington made January disappear in a flash. The sheer speed and drama of events makes it feel like the year is just now getting started.
But it really is February already. If you count holidays, there are really only 10 months left until 2026. Despite that, the vast majority of senior executives I speak to don’t have a clear idea of the few big things they want to achieve this year.
That’s not to say they don’t have plans. In fact, they often have a surplus of them. Executives emerge from year-end planning conclaves with reams of documents outlining targets and goals for the coming year. The problem is that these overly complex strategy decks fail to distill goals into a few big, memorable initiatives for the year. As a result, they tend to get quickly forgotten and tossed aside as metaphorical fires break out that demand immediate attention.
When a colleague of mine recently asked a chief growth officer at a major consumer goods company about their initiatives for the year, the executive literally had to reach for their 50-slide strategic deck before answering. It’s not that they didn’t have goals. It’s that it was impossible for a reasonably intelligent person to keep the large number of abstract ideas in their head.
This is why so many organizations struggle to execute. They create complex strategy decks but never translate them into real priorities and action. Then December arrives and people wonder why they didn’t get more done.
Executives instinctively know they shouldn’t have to consult a deck to identify their main goals for the year. But when so many priorities compete for attention, it’s easy to lose sight of the most important ones. So if this describes you, know that you’re not alone, and don’t beat yourself up—just make time to write out your five big goals for the year.
Why five? Because effective leadership isn’t about juggling fifty initiatives—it’s about prioritizing the handful that really matter. And research suggests that humans’ working memory maxes out at around seven items—hence why it gets really hard to remember phone numbers that are any longer than that. If your list of big goals is too long, no one will remember it, let alone act on it. One of the smartest execs I ever worked with was a chief technology officer who had a Ph.D. from MIT. He was brilliant. But he was too brilliant. His annual goals were 45 critical initiatives and projects that absolutely had to get done. The mere mortals in his organization were understandably lost. So try and keep it to five. Okay six is fine, too…
Getting Clarity
So sit down and don’t get up until you’ve written down those five clear priorities for the year. Each one should be two words. Not a paragraph, not a sentence, just two words. If you’re at an insurance company, one of your big five might be “Advisor Experience.” If you’re in automotive, it might be “Battery Output.” The discipline of boiling things down to two words creates focus and makes it clear what actually matters. Okay, three words are fine, too. 🙂
When you have your five big goals, you can expand each item with a single sentence of explanation. For example, “Advisor Experience: Make our in-person and digital tools consistent and significantly easier to use.” Keep it to a sentence. One paragraph is too long.
The best leaders intuitively understand the power of simplicity. They know that driving businesses forward is about getting people to focus on a few things and then getting them done. Steve Jobs understood it when he returned to Apple and slashed the company’s sprawling product lineup to focus on just four key categories. He boiled everything down to a simple 2X2 matrix representing two categories (mobile and desktop) and two audiences (consumer and professional). Everything else had to go.
Of course, just because your five goals are for this year doesn’t mean they should be short-term. The plans for one year out should be in service of the vision for where your business wants to be in five or seven years. Linking the five goals to this long-term vision helps to focus minds on what really matters, avoiding getting distracted by shorter-term influences.
Jeff Bezos was relentless in forcing Amazon executives to always tie quarterly actions back to a long-term vision. He was notorious for throwing managers out of the room if they just told him their goals for the quarter. He wanted to know how those goals were tied to where Amazon wanted to be in five years.
Cascade The Five
Once you’ve got your five, the next step is to tell your direct reports. Not via email or in a group setting. Do it one-on-one so you can make it clear how each priority impacts them and how they can put them into action.
The usefulness of the one-on-one meeting has become a topic for debate. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky recently revealed that he has largely scrapped one-on-ones because team meetings are a better use of time. I don’t agree. One-on-ones are an important way for you to ensure every person who reports to you has a full understanding of what matters and—crucially—how they are expected to do their part in furthering them.
Bill Walsh, the legendary coach of the San Francisco 49ers, understood this. He once told me that instead of relying on the classic coach’s locker room speech popularized in TV and movies, he spent the whole week talking to every player individually, communicating what was important in a way that was tailored to that player. Then, when game day arrived, he’d reiterate the message to the whole locker room. And players would think “Oh, he’s already told me this. This is for everyone else.” Each of them already knew how his message applied to them and how they were expected to implement it.
Likewise, executives should leave these one-on-ones knowing exactly what the company’s priorities are and how their work fits in.
Once your reports know the five big things, they need to create their own list of five goals. If your head of operations knows that one of the company’s priorities is “Supply Chain Reinvention,” then their list should reflect that—perhaps with something like “Warehouse Automation.” The goal is for every team to break down the company-wide priorities into their own five big things.
When done right, this creates a cascading effect of clarity and alignment throughout the organization. Every employee should know what their department’s priorities are and how they are expected to put them into action. But don’t assume the communication was clear. Ask folks what they think matters most. If they can’t answer, you’ll know the message isn’t getting through.
Breaking It Down
Of course, having five big things alone doesn’t provide the granularity needed to put them into practice on a daily basis during the year. The danger is that you’ll hit September and realize you’re nowhere close to your goals.
Each of the five big things therefore needs to be broken down into quarterly targets that support them. If “Customer Acquisition” is one of your big things, for example, then Q1 might be about fixing the onboarding experience, Q2 about launching a new referral program, and so on. Better yet, track progress weekly or biweekly to know if you’re on track. The best teams don’t wait until the end of a quarter to realize they’re off course.
None of this is rocket science or advanced management theory. It’s basic stuff. But it’s something that I see frequently pushed aside or overly complicated as good intentions get waylaid by our increasingly unpredictable and fast-moving world.
The reality is that most CEOs already have their five big things. They know what they are and may have promised them to Wall Street. But somewhere in the layers of management and day-to-day busy work, that clarity and focus gets lost.
It’s worth fixing that today. Do you know what your five big things are? Can you boil it down to a few words? Do your direct reports know what your five big things are? Have they incorporated them into their own priorities? And have they broken those priorities down into measurable milestones by quarter?
The year really just started. And we have ten months left. When you’re leading a team, clarity is its own form of kindness. Go make big things happen.
