Buffett’s No: Why 12 Top Priorities Create No Focus

By Grace Kim

An organization can carry 12 “top priorities” without having any priorities at all, Inc. columnist Marcel Schwantes writes. His point draws on Warren Buffett’s maxim: “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”

What does every “yes” cost?

Schwantes says managers excel at addition: another initiative, another “important” meeting, or another process or technology meant to make work easier. They are less practiced at subtraction. Once leaders approve work, they rarely remove it from the agenda.

The cost of one approval reaches beyond the executive suite. It becomes a chain of downstream work:

• Meetings to attend.
• Presentations to create.
• Metrics to track.
• Space to fit a new initiative beside work approved last quarter that leadership never formally killed.

For Schwantes, that burden accumulates until priorities lose meaning. He says the Buffett quotation often appears as advice for protecting time and focusing on what matters. His larger argument concerns a leadership decision that becomes more important at senior levels: whether a new priority deserves people, time and attention.

In plain terms, Schwantes says, one executive “yes” becomes many downstream obligations.

Why is “no” an allocation decision?

For Schwantes, leadership includes deciding where resources will not go. He cites two Harvard Business Review studies documenting the cost of carrying too many projects:

• September 2018: Research found that companies struggled to kill projects even after those projects stopped supporting strategy. Executives kept adding initiatives and pushed overload farther down the organization, according to Schwantes’s summary.
• August 2025: A Harvard Business Review article described the same problem. Many organizations knew they had too many projects but still struggled to eliminate them, slowing execution and muddying strategic priorities.

Schwantes also draws on his years in leadership work. He says executives talk about focus while rewarding addition. Each idea receives support because nobody wants to kill something that might work. He calls that behavior organizational hoarding rather than strategy.

The takeaway in Schwantes’s account is direct: adding work without ending work distributes distraction rather than creating focus.

What must stop before a new priority starts?

Schwantes recommends one question whenever a leadership team approves a significant priority: “What are we going to stop doing to make room for this?” He rejects leaving the trade-off to be figured out later. If nothing comes off the table, he says, the team has not prioritized anything; it has increased workload.

Schwantes says that discipline matters most when resources are tight. Research cited in a September 2026 Harvard Business Review article examines work that keeps growing while resources remain flat. His conclusion: leaders cannot keep asking teams to do more with fewer resources, so something has to come off the table.

The practical test, in Schwantes’s view, is not simply how much more the organization can accomplish. Leaders also need to ask why existing work continues. A new approval should carry a specific termination alongside it.

Schwantes’s takeaway is unambiguous: every major “yes” needs a named “no,” or the approval creates work without buying priority.

Why does saying no become harder?

Schwantes says successful leaders attract more demands from customers, employees, investors and partners. Each group expects attention, but a CEO cannot satisfy all of them. The risk of trying is organizational strain.

A CEO who refuses to disappoint anyone, according to Schwantes, eventually disappoints almost everyone. The organization becomes stretched too thin to execute its best ideas exceptionally well.

He also rejects a literal reading of Buffett’s maxim. The recommendation is not to reject every request or walk around saying no all day. Leaders need enough clarity about what matters that refusing everything else becomes easier.

Buffett’s lesson, as Schwantes reads it, turns saying no into a discipline of allocation. The next leadership approval should name the work it displaces; without a cancellation, the organization is only adding load.