Priority is Advantage: Why Giants Trip Over To-Do Lists

Because "busy" is not a leadership strategy. Priority isn't what we say we want to do; priority is action.

Thanks for subscribing and exploring the critical gap between talk and action, with ideas from my books Priority is Action and Priority is Prediction.

TL;DR: Scale is supposed to be a super-power, yet the bigger the enterprise, the shakier its grip on priorities. Headcount, hierarchy, and heritage tech create drag—turning crisp roadmaps into spaghetti charts and decisions into group therapy sessions. Until leaders cap work-in-progress, slash “zombie” projects, and track structural friction instead of headcount, their advantage stays theoretical.

“I Thought We Were Launching … Next Quarter?”

Monday, 08:15 GMT. Top floor of a glass and steel office building in London. The telecom’s “Green Horizon” handset is due this spring. Seventeen global workstreams beam in—Sydney at midnight, São Paulo before dawn—each clutching a slide deck and none of them on their first (or even third) cup of coffee.

• Layer 1: Brand insists the packaging must “feel sustainable.”

• Layer 2: Legal reminds everyone that “sustainable” is a regulated term in three markets.

• Layer 3: Security wants a last-minute penetration test because group CISO heard a rumor on Slack.

• Layer 4–6: Finance, Procurement, and HR weigh in because, well, they were invited.

By the time the Gantt chart appears, it resembles linguine hurled at a whiteboard. The launch slips another quarter, ultimately nine months late, while a 200-person rival in Helsinki ships a pared-down, three-feature handset and walks off with the EU eco-conscious segment.

The unwelcome punchline from the exhausted program lead: “They had more money, more people, and a longer runway—yet they still ate our lunch.”

The Paradox of Scale

Headcount growth promises capacity, but in practice, it breeds drag. Two-thirds of large-company executives concede their organizations are “overly complex and inefficient,” citing slow decisions and tangled accountability (McKinsey & Company, 2023) .

Amazon’s 2024 “bureaucracy mailbox” illustrates how even a famously decisive firm found itself patching internal red-tape: employees now flag redundant approvals, and leadership prunes process weekly (Schretzmann & Salimi, 2025). When a company that measures meetings in petabytes of data bothers to install a complaint box, the signal is loud.

As headcount rises, so do interdependencies, hand-offs, and “alignment” rituals. Each additional layer adds its own gravity:

• Interdependencies. One product tweak cascades across supply-chain, compliance, and 12 market teams.

• Bureaucratic drag. Approval matrices thicken faster than the roadmap.

• Status theater. Meetings proliferate to reconcile the first two bullets.

Misalignment. Projects acquire multiple “north stars,” leaving teams chasing constellations.

Must-listen episode from The Agile Brand podcast:

The result? Activity masquerades as progress, and shipping dates become a joke that is about as funny as the program lead we heard from earlier.

Scaling to do great things isn’t doomed to fail, but it needs guardrails. Let’s continue to pull apart consensus culture, legacy tech, and “zombie” projects, then offers structural fixes—because until the friction is measured and capped, “bigger” only means a longer to-do list.

References

Jassy, A. (2024, September 16). Message from CEO Andy Jassy: Strengthening our culture and teams. About Amazon. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy-latest-update-on-amazon-return-to-office-manager-team-ratio 

McKinsey & Company. (2023, April 26). The state of organizations 2023: Ten shifts transforming organizations. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-state-of-organizations-2023 

Paradis, T. (2024, September 17). Amazon CEO's “bureaucracy mailbox” for employees is a smart idea that more companies need. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-wants-workers-report-wasteful-bureaucracy-boost-efficiency-good-thing-2024-9 

In the next newsletter we'll continue to explore the dangers of consensus culture and how to move pasat it to focus on making real, meaningful progress.

Make sure to get the book, Priority is Action: 7 Principles for Better Strategies, Decisions, and Outcomes, now available in print, digital, and audio.

Like the ideas here but not sure where to start? I can help. This is what I do: helping organizations determine how to make better data-driven decisions so the right things done. Contact me about: consulting & advisory, talks, workshops, strategy, and other ways to implement change. =>Let's talk.