Your ego picked your last three projects

Focus is not a discipline problem. It is a decision somebody made months ago, in a room where the idea sounded good.

In his 1990 letter to Berkshire shareholders, Warren Buffett described two pairs of managers he had backed: Carl Reichardt and Paul Hazen at Wells Fargo, Tom Murphy and Dan Burke at Capital Cities/ABC. The last of four things he says they have in common is that they let "their abilities, not their egos, determine what they attempt."

What interests me is the pair of decision makers that sentence implies. Ability and ego both produce a yes. They answer different questions. Ability asks what you can actually run. Ego asks what would look impressive if it worked.

The second price of every yes

Every new initiative has a stated cost. Money, headcount, a launch date. It also carries a price nobody writes down: your attention, and the attention of the few people who move things in your business.

That attention is fixed. It does not scale with ambition and it cannot be borrowed. So the honest way to read a growth plan is not a list of what you will add, but a schedule of what quietly gets less.

The damage is rarely dramatic. A new line launches and the existing one stops getting the hours it used to. Nothing fails. Margins drift, customers wait longer for answers, and nobody connects it to a decision taken two quarters ago.

Which one is answering

You can usually tell which one answered by the shape of the case.

• It is described as adjacent. Adjacent is the most expensive word in business. It means work that sounds easy and has to be built from scratch.
• It cannot name Monday's owner. If that gets worked out later, you have approved an idea, not a project.
• Nobody will say the number out loud. If what it has to earn, and by when, is never named, it will not be measured.

What subtraction actually costs

I chaired the board of an ASX-listed company, ran the search for a new chief executive, and took the company through to a relisting. We held two priorities. Get the right chief executive into the chair. Get the company relisted.

Holding a list to two is easy to write and hard to do. Saying no is not a private act of restraint; it is a conversation with someone who brought you something good.

As an owner-operator of serviced apartments and a venue, with full P&L responsibility, the same test kept arriving. There is always another revenue idea, and most work on paper. The question was never whether the idea was good, but whether I had someone to hand it to, and whether I would take the hours out of something already paying.

Eighteen years and five businesses built and sold, and this is the mistake I keep recognising. Rarely a bad idea. A reasonable idea with nobody to carry it.

The objection worth taking seriously

Applied literally, that rule freezes a company inside what it can already do. Some capability only appears after you attempt work you cannot yet run. So the test is not whether the work stretches you. It is whether you resourced the stretch or only approved it. A stretch with a named owner and hours taken visibly out of something else is a decision. The same stretch with none of those is ego wearing a growth plan.

Do this before Friday

Write down every initiative open in your business. The test for inclusion is simple: it has a meeting, a budget line or a channel. Then add two columns. In the first, the person moving it forward in the next seven days, and the hours they have. In the second, who wanted it, and what it would prove if it worked.

If you run out of owners before you run out of initiatives, that gap is your capacity, not your ambition.

Then read the second column against the first. Where there is no owner and a flattering answer beside it, you are looking at something ego approved. Stop one of those. Not park it, not revisit it next quarter. Tell the people involved this week that it is finished, and give the reason as capacity, not merit.

Next Friday, check whether the work you kept received more of you than it did the week before. If it did not, you have not chosen anything. You have only made a list.