Sooner or later, every leader has to take a hard look at a product or service they offer and figure out whether it still deserves a place in the business. Usually, that means choosing one of three paths: doubling down on it, revamping it or moving on. 

Peter Drucker believed that last option deserves far more attention than it gets. He called it “planned abandonment” — the discipline of regularly letting go of what you’ve outgrown, or what’s become obsolete, so that you can free up time, talent and money for what’s next. As he saw it, the first step toward growth “is to decide what to abandon.” He even offered a simple question to guide that decision: If we weren’t already doing this, knowing what we know now, would we start it today?

Try this sometime. Ask five people connected to your company what you do. It could be a recent hire, a longtime employee, your bookkeeper, a vendor you’ve worked with for years, or a customer who sends referrals your way. Then compare notes.

You’ll probably get five different answers, and none of them will be wrong, exactly. One person leads with the product, another with the price, another with a story from 2014 you stopped telling years ago. Each version has some element of truth to it, and together, they describe a company that’s hard to pin down.

John Deere had a problem. Their equipment was top-teir, their brand was trusted, and their message was clear. Yet sales to homeowners stayed flat while competitors gained ground.

The issue wasn't the product. It was the assumption that everyone buying a lawn tractor wanted the same thing.

There's a reason most organizations default to one-size-fits-all messaging: it's efficient. One campaign, one audience, one set of materials. You cover the most ground with the least effort.

And there's a comforting logic to it. More reach should mean more response, right?

But reach isn't resonance.

There’s a version of this that happens in almost every organization. A campaign comes together and on paper it looks great. There’s smart strategy and solid tactics. It’s textbook, the kind of campaign that checks every box in the brief. Then it goes out into the world and the response is muted. There’s no clear signal that it moved anyone. 

When Google launched in 1998, search engines were portals — cluttered pages covered in news, weather, links, and ads. Yahoo's homepage alone had over 100 links competing for attention.

Google offered something radical: a logo, a search box, and two buttons. That was it.

The instinct to add more is hard to resist. Read on to learn why more isn't always better. 

Last week, Mrinank Sharma resigned from Anthropic, one of the world's leading artificial intelligence companies. Sharma wasn't a mid-level engineer or a disgruntled employee. He led the company's Safeguards Research Team. His job was to keep AI safe.

In his resignation letter, posted publicly on X, Sharma wrote: "The world is in peril. And not just from AI, or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment." He added that throughout his time at Anthropic, he had "repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions." His final project before leaving? Understanding how AI assistants could make us less human.

You've spent years in your field. You know the terminology, the frameworks, the nuance behind every decision. That expertise is hard-won — and it might be getting in your way.

There's a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge. Once you know something deeply, it becomes almost impossible to remember what it was like not to know it. The language that feels precise to you sounds like static to someone hearing it for the first time.

Think about the brands you recognize instantly — not by their logo, but by how they sound. A certain tone, a turn of phrase, a personality that comes through even in a short email.

Now ask yourself: does your organization have that kind of voice?