Strategy Is Deciding What Not to Do.

Strategy is deciding what not to do.

To choose is to let go. It means letting go of everything except the one thing you chose... Personally, as time goes on, I feel the importance of "letting go" more and more. And I also feel just how hard letting go can be.

We tend to resist letting go. Out of fear, or out of greed. And that indecisiveness keeps us from focusing and blocks our progress.

Reading "Inside Apple," I was again drawn to the sections on Apple's pursuit of "simplicity." "Most companies, afraid of failure, cannot focus on one thing at a time. In fact, narrowing from 25 ideas down to 4 is genuinely frightening." That's from a former Apple executive. Apple's chief Tim Cook is said to joke that he can put all of Apple's products on a single conference-room table.

There's a famous anecdote about "choice" that Steve Jobs told at Yahoo. In 2007 Yahoo was in crisis, and founder Jerry Yang returned as CEO to rescue it. He gathered about 200 executives for a meeting and invited Jobs as an outside speaker. There, Jobs said this to Jerry Yang and the executives.

"Strategy is deciding what not to do... Pick just one thing you can do brilliantly. We knew it was the Mac... Yahoo seems like an interesting company. A company that can be whatever it wants to be... But I don't really know if Yahoo is a content company or a technology company. Pick one. I already know which direction I would pick."

Yahoo has been struggling ever since. Apple, on the other hand, kept saying "no" and focused on the most essential things, and rose to become one of the world's great companies.

To choose is to say "no" and let go. It's hard, but that's where the way forward lies.