Key Takeaways
- Excess isn’t a strategy. It is noise disguised as progress.
- Pruning is power. Subtraction creates clarity, focus, and momentum.
- Leaders win by restraint. The courage to stop often unlocks more growth than the compulsion to add.
The Tyranny of More
Business loves addition. More channels. More campaigns. More dashboards. More of everything. If activity is high, we convince ourselves that progress must follow.
But addition has become the most dangerous addiction in the modern C-suite. We’ve mistaken motion for movement. We’ve built brands that sprawl rather than endure. And in the noise, we’ve lost sight of the truth: growth often comes from subtraction.
The Courage to Cut
Subtraction is an act of leadership. It’s far harder to look a board in the eye and say, “We are doing less” than to announce the launch of another campaign or product line. Yet history rewards the leaders who choose courage over clutter.
Apple didn’t ascend by adding; it ascended by cutting. When Steve Jobs returned in 1997, he killed roughly 70% of Apple’s product line and refocused the company on a simple four-quadrant matrix, one desktop and one portable for consumers, and the same for professionals. That radical simplification created the clarity and momentum for Apple’s next era
The same pattern is clear at Procter & Gamble. In 2014–2016, P&G divested Duracell (among many other smaller or underperforming brands) and cut its total number of brands significantly (reportedly examining up to 100 brands to exit or sell off) in order to concentrate marketing, innovation, and investment on its strongest names like Tide, Pampers, and Oral-B.
Growth often hides not in what you add, but in the courage to decide what no longer belongs.
We remember the brands that dared to edit themselves.
October: The Pruning Season
This is the month for subtraction. Not January, when resolutions feel fragile. Not mid-year, when momentum makes us fearful of slowing down. October is the natural pause, the space between execution and vision.
This is the moment to ask:
- What will we not carry into 2026?
- Which stories are we brave enough to stop telling?
- Which campaigns deserve oxygen, and which are suffocating us?
Pruning is not about doing less for the sake of austerity. It’s about creating the conditions where the essential can finally breathe.
Subtraction as Strategy
We admire brands that appear bold, clear, and timeless. But we rarely acknowledge that their power comes not from the many things they said, but from the countless things they refused to say.
Subtraction clarifies positioning. It sharpens messaging. It liberates teams from the grind of low-value activity and re-centers them on the work that truly moves markets. It is not minimalism. It is discipline.
And discipline is the rarest resource in business today.
The Aha! Moment
Every leader chases the “next big thing.” But sometimes, the aha moment is realizing that the future isn’t waiting for you to add. It’s waiting for you to subtract.
The brands that will thrive in 2026 are not those that shouted the loudest. They’re the ones that dared to go quiet on the wrong things so they could be unmistakably clear on the right ones.
Questions to Ask Yourself
- If our brand’s future depended on saying only one thing in 2026, what would it be?
- Which initiatives persist out of habit rather than impact?
- Where has volume dulled our sharpest edge?
- What are we afraid to cut and why?
- Am I leading by addition, or by courage?
As leaders, we are conditioned to equate addition with ambition. But true ambition is measured not by how much we can stack onto the calendar, but by what we have the discipline to remove. Subtraction is not retreat. It is refinement. It is clarity. It is the boldest strategy of all.
As we prepare for 2026, I challenge you to resist the urge to add one more campaign, one more message, one more layer of complexity. Instead, take something away. Make space. And watch how much stronger your brand becomes when the essential is all that remains.
If you’re ready to explore how subtraction can sharpen your marketing strategy, let’s talk. Sometimes the most transformative growth begins not with “yes,” but with “no.”
