The power of subtraction
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In 2013 I co-founded a company called Air Share.
If you know Shazam, you know the shape of what we were building. Shazam is software that listens to a few seconds of a song and tells you what it is. We built something similar for radio. Our technology went further and recognised songs, ads, interviews and stories playing on any station, so the moment you heard something worth remembering while driving, you could capture it instead of losing it.
We were small, had raised investment and were tracking in the right direction. And for a while we sat squarely inside what Jim Collins calls the Hedgehog Concept.
The Hedgehog comes from his book, Good to Great and it’s a simple idea that sits at the intersection of three circles: what you are deeply passionate about, what you can be the best in the world at, and what drives your economic engine.
Collins' argument is that great companies are disciplined about staying inside all three. Most companies drift outside one of them, call it growth and ultimately come to realise they need to course-correct and return to within the three circles.
We were two for three.
We were passionate about helping people capture and share radio. We were on track to be the best in the world at the recognition technology itself. Where we came undone was the third circle.
Early on we faced a fork. We could build a combined hardware and software product, something physical, distinctive, beautiful, and own the entire experience end to end. Or we could be software only, embedding our technology inside the apps the radio stations already had.
We chose hardware and software.
It was the more exciting decision. It was also the one that did not serve our economic engine. We had picked the path that looked like the bigger company we wanted to be, rather than the one that matched what could fund us. The technology wasn’t the problem. It was how we went to market.
I think about that fork often, because the hardest strategic decisions are rarely about what to chase. They are about what to put down. And almost always, the thing you need to put down is something you are proud of.
The same fork, at scale
This month British Petroleum made a version of that decision in public.
New CEO Meg O'Neill reorganised the company around two units, upstream and downstream, and folded its renewable energy business into a smaller corner of the business. The low carbon division that BP had spent years building, the one that carried so much of its public identity, no longer sits at the centre. “We are moving firmly towards a simpler, stronger and more valuable BP,” she said. No job losses were announced, and the framing was about clarity: who owns what, and how quickly decisions get made.
You might not like the oil and gas industry, but it supplies a large share of the world's energy, and the decision in front of BP was less about energy politics and more about the three circles.
Was BP ever the company best positioned to pioneer green energy? It was surrounded by firms built for nothing else, faster and more specialised, with economic engines designed around the transition from day one. BP was carrying that ambition alongside a century of oil and gas infrastructure, board turnover, and shareholders asking hard questions about returns.
Passionate? Maybe.
Best in the world? Harder to argue.
Green energy economic engine? Clearly strained.
The decision is not a retreat from the future. It is a company being honest about which circle it was failing.
If BP steps back from green energy, that capacity does not vanish. It moves toward companies better built to carry it. The world's energy supply chain may end up stronger, not weaker, because a business that could not be the best at something handed that ground to firms that can.
Letting go is not the same as giving up. Sometimes it is how the whole system gets better.
I have watched this dynamic play out in rooms many times. A founder holds onto a product line because the team built it and loved it. A CEO keeps a division alive because killing it feels like admitting a past decision was wrong. The attachment is rarely strategic. It’s often emotional. We hold onto things because we were once proud of them, not because we are still the right ones to carry them.
What subtraction asks of you
Decisions like BP's share four characteristics, and they show up every time, in companies of any size.
First, they are made with imperfect information. You never have the full picture. You act on the best read you have and accept that some of it will turn out to be wrong.
Second, they are met with scepticism. The louder the decision, the louder the doubt, and the scepticism is loudest of all when you are stopping something people admired.
Third, they are judged only in hindsight. No strategic decision is proven on the day it is announced. It is proven years later, by people with information you did not have.
And finally, they are grounded in the Hedgehog. The decisions that hold up over time are the ones rooted in an honest answer about which of the three circles you can win.
Anyone can add. Adding feels like progress, like ambition, like momentum.
Subtraction is harder, because subtraction means looking at something you built and admitting it does not belong inside your three circles anymore.
When you accept that you cannot be the best in the world at something, you do not have to abandon it or limp along carrying it. You can hand it to someone who can and there are plenty of options including divestment, licensing or joint ventures.
Air Share's better path was a partnership option we saw but did not take, embedding our technology inside someone else's product rather than building our own. BP's renewables may find their strongest future in someone else's hands.
Simplicity gets dismissed as the easy option. It’s in fact the opposite. Simplicity under disruption, when the ground is moving and the pressure is on to do more, is one of the hardest disciplines a leader can hold and execute. It asks you to subtract when every instinct says add.
Look at your own business, your own portfolio or your own week. Find the thing you are still carrying because you were once proud of it. The product, the client, the division or the initiative you championed.
Now ask yourself, honestly, whether you are the right one to carry it. Or whether the strongest, most valuable version of what you are building is the one with less in it.
PS If this essay helped, Episode 215 (How CEOs grow their business by doing less, not more) from my podcast is worth a listen. Tune in on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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