When Everything Matters, How Do You Decide What Matters Most?
The hardest decisions in business aren’t always between right and wrong. They’re between two things that are both right.
Grow revenue or protect your margin? Invest in brand building or lead generation? Recruit people or invest in technology? Pursue a new market or concentrate resources on the one you’ve already got?
These are the reality of running and growing a business and we’re seeing them become harder for everyone at the top, from founders and CEOs to CMOs and Heads of Marketing.
The problem isn’t a shortage of priorities
PwC’s 2026 CEO Survey provides an interesting insight into where those in charge are spending their time. UK CEOs say they spend 55% of their time focused on issues affecting the next 12 months. 34% goes on the next one to five years. Just 11% is focused beyond that.
The immediate demands of running a business don’t disappear because you want to think about the future. Revenue still needs to be generated against an aggressive plan, the team still needs looking after and costs need controlling. However, the business also needs someone thinking about what comes next.
The tension exists beyond the CEO. Gartner recently described what it calls the “CMO trilemma”…
- constrained resources
- increasing expectations for growth
- the requirement to deliver AI transformation
The expectation is that all will be delivered simultaneously and half of CMOs say short-term demands are now getting in the way of long-term planning.
None of those demands is unreasonable. The marketing function needs to contribute commercially today and also create the demand, reputation and customer preference that will drive growth tomorrow. The problem is that everything seems to matter without the resources to make it all happen.
Choosing between two right answers
Often, people think of difficult decisions as problems where we haven’t found the right answer. However, we’re increasingly convinced that isn’t the hardest part of the job. The really difficult decisions are often those where there are several perfectly good answers.
There is a case for investing in the long-term brand and generating more leads this quarter. It makes sense to enter a new market but there is an equally compelling case for concentrating resources on the existing one.
Neither position is wrong but you probably can’t do everything.
Money and people are finite and, perhaps most importantly, leadership attention is finite. Faced with several good options the temptation is to keep them all alive. That’s still a choice which means spreading money, people and attention thinly across many projects.
The consequence? It isn’t simply an overloaded diary. It’s diluted investment, competing priorities and trying to do six things adequately rather than two things exceptionally well.
So, the danger isn’t always making the wrong decision. It’s making too many right decisions at the same time. One of the most important jobs, therefore, is being brutal about priorities.
More answers, but is there more clarity?
There is an interesting contradiction here. We’ve arguably never had more information available to help us make those decisions and now we have AI.
Ask a sufficiently capable AI system whether you should increase your marketing investment and it can produce an extremely persuasive argument for doing so. Ask it to explain why you should reduce marketing expenditure and protect margin instead and it can probably produce an equally persuasive answer.
The problem is that a persuasive answer isn’t necessarily the right plan for your business. AI doesn’t remove the need for judgement. In some respects, it makes judgement more important.
More information doesn’t necessarily create more clarity. Sometimes it just creates more options. Eventually someone still has to make the decision and that requires space to think.
When did you last have meaningful time to think?
The people responsible for making the biggest decisions are often the people with the least uninterrupted time to think about them. The danger isn’t simply that they are busy. It’s that the urgent decisions repeatedly crowd out the consequential ones.
Maybe this is why some of the most useful conversations we’ve had with business leaders haven’t involved anyone providing an answer. They’ve involved someone asking a question they hadn’t considered or challenging an assumption everyone else had accepted.
Sometimes simply explaining a problem to someone outside the immediate situation makes you see it differently. That’s particularly valuable because those responsible can become surrounded by people who, quite reasonably, have a stake in the answer.
Sales sees the sales problem. Marketing sees the brand problem. Finance sees the return on investment. Product sees the opportunity to build something better.
They may all be right. The people in charge ultimately have to make the choice between them. Perhaps, then, what those at the top need isn’t another source of information and answers. It’s somewhere they can test their thinking.
In a world where access to answers is becoming almost limitless, the scarce resource may no longer be information. It may be having the space to think clearly about what matters most.
Source:
CEO Survey