"The leadership team falls in love with a big idea and turns it into a big project. This project becomes the top priority—apparently the future of the company depends on it."

"But when the product finally launches (much later than anyone expected) the results are underwhelming, to say the least. Customers are generally uninterested, key metrics are unaffected."

"But this project is too important to fail, so the leaders now rally the troops for a massive rescue operation."

"It feels like we’re just one feature, one campaign, away from breaking through. But we’re not. The vast majority of these projects end up as a colossal waste of time."

"Output-focus is a key contributing factor here. In a company where goals and incentives are centered on execution and production, doing becomes more important than achieving."

"In this sense the big project serves an important purpose: it gives everyone something big and important to work on (and later to boast about in perf reviews.) Left unattended this culture can breed a particular type of manager that uses big projects as springboards for promotion."

"“If you’re charismatic, you can get resources for anything … then you can engage in a ton of what I call “Success Theater”, to try to make it seem like you’re a big success. And so, those people tend to get the celebrations, whether they actually add any value or not. They’re like a cancer in most organizations”"

"There can be many ideas, and most will create little value, if at all. So setting goals for launching one big, unproven, idea is a recipe for tremendous waste."

"The alternative is to set goals for outcomes—the benefits we wish deliver to the customers and to the business."

"Hierarchical, top-down companies assume that the leaders are able to forecast the future and pick the right ideas. The people in the middle and the bottom are there to figure out the details. This model doesn’t work anymore (and I doubt it ever did)."

"In modern organizations a lot of the knowledge and expertise live at the edges."

"Smart and creative people tire of constantly chasing someone else’s big ideas."

"There are only so many “must-have” projects one can get excited about (especially as eventually they turn out not to be a must-have at all). People become distrustful of the leadership and lose passion or leave"

"The key role of the leader is to define the goals (intent, success), and to provide as much context as possible—what people need to know to succeed."

"Then he/she helps the reports discover the right solutions. It’s a different form of collaboration."

"Top-down, big-bet projects happen partly because we think that’s how strategy works."

"I’m sorry to say, that’s not strategy, that’s just a roadmap on steroids (or more accurately a crapshoot.)"

"Detecting opportunities and threats and setting goals to validate and address them, is really where leadership plays a critical role. Sadly in most organizations that’s also where it comes short, moving people to feel there’s no vision or real strategy."

"Amazon pursued this opportunity with a series of ideas, which all failed, until eventually in the year 2000 it launched Amazon Marketplace."

"The lesson here is that a strategy is never about chasing particular big ideas, but about the opportunities and threats the company chooses to address."

"The problem is with starting big."

"Given new information, the sunk cost fallacy makes it very hard to improve on the idea or to let go of it altogether."

"The iPhone was seeded by at least five smaller projects that eventually merged."

"For bigger opportunities you can divide the work among multiple teams, as Netflix has done with its swimlane model."

"As the project grows larger and more teams join, we strive to break the work in such a way that teams are “highly aligned, loosely coupled”, to use a Netflix principle."