When work piles up and deadlines start slipping, most leadership teams try to solve the problem by piling on more work. They call extra meetings, set up new tracking boards, and look to hire more staff to handle the rush. Greg Kish, the Founder and Managing Partner at Fusion Advisors, has spent nearly two decades watching companies make this exact mistake across sports, entertainment, and technology. In his view, the real fix for a stuck organization is almost never doing more, but having the courage to strip away the noise.
The Trap of Endless Activity
When pressure mounts inside an office, the default move is to create new tasks so everyone feels like progress is happening. Calendars fill to the brim, inboxes blow up, and teams end up exhausted while the main goals sit untouched. “So when true pressure hits an organization, the natural reaction is usually to add more: another meeting, another report, a dashboard, work stream, and maybe even another person,” Kish points out. “At that point, everyone gets busier, calendars fill up, and there’s just a lot more activity. But the question is, are we really getting more done?”
Activity does not equal achievement, yet leaders still fall into the habit of measuring effort by how full a weekly calendar looks. Over time, this reflex creates an environment where people spend more time talking about work than doing it. Kish has seen this cycle play out across dozens of major brand projects throughout his career. “When things get complicated, our instinct is to add,” he explains. “And in my experience, sometimes the better answer is simply to take things away.”
Finding One Target for the Next 90 Days
Walk into a typical boardroom, and you will likely see a list of ten different things that all carry top billing. Trying to focus on everything at once guarantees that teams make very little progress on anything that counts. “I’ve been in plenty of rooms where there are tens of priorities on the board and somehow every one of them is labeled number one,” Kish says. “And that just doesn’t work. If everything’s a priority, nothing really is at that point.”
To break out of that trap, companies need to narrow their immediate focus down to one specific result. Setting a single finish line gives every department a clear lens for planning their work week. “Ask a simple question,” Kish advises. “What is the one outcome that we absolutely need to accomplish over the next 90 days? Let’s get everybody aligned around that first.” Once a team agrees on that single outcome, handling shiny new ideas becomes much simpler. Instead of chasing every fresh suggestion, managers have a clear test to see if a new project is worth their time right now. “And then when the next great idea or thought comes up, and there most likely will always be the next great idea, you have something to measure it against,” Kish notes. “Does this help get us where we’re trying to go? And if not, maybe it doesn’t need to be the priority right now.”
Fixing Who Owns the Decision
Most companies spend endless hours checking off daily task lists, but few review how decisions get made behind the scenes. When a project grinds to a halt, the delay rarely comes from lazy workers. “We spend a lot of time tracking tasks,” Kish says. “I think we spend far less time looking at the decisions behind those tasks.”
In complex projects, simple sign-offs often get stuck in review loops because nobody wants to step up and make the call. That uncertainty causes work to sit idle for days while people wait on someone else to approve it. “I’ve seen decisions that should take a day sometimes take two weeks because six people need to weigh in and nobody is totally sure who owns it,” Kish points out. “And it seems as if everyone is waiting for somebody else.” Solving this problem does not require firing people or hiring expensive new consultants to run the team. It just means giving one person the authority to say yes or no so work can keep moving. “And that’s not a people problem. That’s a structure problem,” Kish explains. “Give the right people clear ownership and let them make the decision.”
Cutting Out Friction Before Spending More
Whenever sales drop or leads dry up, the typical response is to throw more budget and new hires at the issue. Kish believes that adding resources to a slow system only covers up the real logjams that hold people back. “Before you add more resources, look where you can remove friction,” Kish emphasizes. “This to me is probably the biggest one.” In practice, high costs and slow delivery are often caused by old habits that no one has bothered to clean up. Simple fixes like cutting duplicate meetings or dropping reports nobody reads can free up hours of lost time every single week. “Maybe there’s a report that nobody uses, or three meetings that could become one,” Kish says. “There could be two teams unknowingly doing the same work, maybe five people are involved in a decision that really only needs one owner, or maybe we’ve simply been doing something for so long that nobody stopped to ask why we’re still doing it.”
Taking tasks off the board gives employees the mental room they need to do their best work on the things that move the needle. When leaders strip away the clutter, teams stop second-guessing their daily jobs and start moving much faster. “Simplifying doesn’t mean you’re doing less,” Kish reflects. “It means you’re creating more room for the things that matter. And when you do that, people make clearer decisions faster, execution gets better, and real momentum happens.” When facing a major business hurdle, the pressure to start three new projects will always feel strong. But the leaders who win are usually the ones who know how to protect their team from unnecessary busywork. “So before you add another initiative, tool, meeting, or person, ask a different question,” Kish suggests. “What can we take off the table? Sometimes the fastest way to move an organization forward is simply to get some of these things out of the way.”
Follow Greg Kish on LinkedIn for more insights on organizational strategy, simplifying operations, and driving business growth in sports, entertainment, and technology.
