Kill Your Darlings

Do you kill your (business strategy) darlings? In creativity, the ability to let go of precious elements that aren't working is hard, but vital. In business too, leaders struggle to let go of precious ideas that should have worked, but clearly don't for some reason. Good leaders must be prepared to kill these 'darlings'!

Like an artist, I believe good business leaders should:

• Step back and consider the whole picture (pernicious problems are rarely visible when your nose is almost touching the canvas)

• Prototype and test ideas (it's much easier to delete that tree in a sketch, much harder when you've rendered a whole picture around it)

• Battle the sunk cost fallacy (it's tough to delete that tree you love in the sketch, it's brutal to delete it after you spend 3 hours on it)

• Have a visceral sense of the overall rhythm and balance of the business (problems seemingly in one area of the image are often caused by mistakes elsewhere)

Killing your darlings is hard, the loss is genuine, but without it, you and your organisation will carry them for ever.