We've been told to do more with less and I have to decide what stops.

What to do when you are told to do more with less and have to decide what stops

Two thousand and three. The LEGO Group is in trouble.

The company has accumulated roughly eight hundred million dollars of debt. Over the preceding decade it has diluted itself from a construction-toy business into a portfolio of theme parks, clothing lines, video games, and a catalogue of thirteen thousand unique brick designs — most of which appear in a single set and never appear again. The board brings in a younger executive called Yur-en Vee Knooth-storp, a former McKinsey consultant already inside the company as CFO, and the following year promotes him to chief executive.

Knooth-storp's approach is the one you'd least expect from a management consultant. He doesn't restructure. He doesn't reorganise. He subtracts.

He sells the theme parks. He halves the brick catalogue. He cancels most of the product lines that had been added in the name of growth. He refocuses the entire company back on the core construction sets the brand had been built on in the first place.

LEGO doesn't grow its way out of the crisis. It subtracts its way out. Within a decade, LEGO has overtaken Mattel to become the largest toy maker in the world.

"We've been told to do more with less and I have to decide what stops."

The feeling is ruthless.

The word sits uneasily — ruthlessness isn't in most managers' job descriptions, and nobody in HR ever put it on a performance review. But it's what the moment requires. And the way to be ruthless well, rather than ruthlessly badly, is to understand what's actually trapping you before you start cutting.

First work out what is actually trapping you

Two common traps. They look identical in a budget meeting. They need different moves.

When sunk cost is holding you in place

Choice one: past investment. A project you can't kill because you've already sunk three quarters into it. The problem is sunk cost — people are weirdly bad at ignoring money they've already spent. The move is counter-intuitive. Cut the project that has cost the most so far, first. Not the smallest. Not the easiest. The most expensive. Because everything else you cut afterwards will feel easier by comparison. That's the point. You break the grip of sunk cost by doing the hardest cut first, which resets what "hard" means for everything that follows.

When the team is too exhausted to cut again

Choice two: morale. The team is exhausted. Another round of cuts will break something you can't rebuild. In that case, counter-intuitively, cut an extra five per cent from the core budget — and spend the saving on one conspicuous, disproportionate act of generosity. A real Christmas party. A decent coffee machine. Something visible and unreasonable for the scale of the cuts. The gesture matters more than the ledger. People work through hard times for leaders who notice that times are hard.

How to be ruthless in the right order

Three tools. The discipline is to be ruthless in the right order.

Find the work absorbing capacity without earning it

The first is

Value vs Effort Matrix.

The lineage on this one is shared rather than singular. The matrix sits in the family of two-by-two prioritisation tools that emerged out of management consulting practice through the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties — no single named origin, several competing claimants, and the truth is probably that consultants in different shops reinvented the move independently because the underlying logic is that obvious.

The reason the tool exists is that capacity gets absorbed by work nobody put on a grid. Quiet projects accumulate. Maintenance overhead grows. The team is busy without anyone being able to say what they're busy on. Until you plot the work, the cuts conversation is impossible.

The unique insight is what to look for. Most teams plot their work, find the low-effort high-value quadrant, and say those are our priorities. The actual move is the opposite quadrant. High-effort, low-value — that's the work that's been absorbing capacity without earning it. Those are the first cuts.

What you get is a defensible cuts list with the absorbed work made visible. The cuts are arguable in the meeting because they're plotted on the same axes everyone agreed to.

So. How to run it.

Plot. Every piece of work on the team's plate goes on the matrix. Two axes — value delivered, effort to deliver. No exceptions. Anything not plotted is invisible to the cuts conversation.

Scan. Look at the high-effort low-value quadrant first. Read each item out loud. Ask the room why each one is still on the board. The silence after the question is the diagnosis.

Cut. The high-effort low-value items go first, in order of effort spent. Then look at high-effort high-value — the items that earn their place but might not earn it now, against this quarter's resourcing. Those are the harder calls. The matrix doesn't make them easier; it makes them visible.

Commit the room to the no, in writing

The second is

MoSCoW Prioritisation.

Dai Clegg developed MoSCoW at Oracle UK in nineteen ninety-four, as part of the Dynamic Systems Development Method. The acronym stands for the four categories: Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, Won't Have. The tool has been adopted across agile and lean product practice in the decades since, and the four-category shape has held essentially unchanged.

The reason the tool exists is that the cuts decision needs documentation — saying no to specific things, in writing, with stakeholder sign-off. Without the document, the no doesn't survive contact with the next sponsor who wants their thing back on the list.

The unique insight is which column does the work. Most discussion goes to the Must Have column — what's the minimum that has to ship — but the column that actually changes behaviour is won'T Have. A MoSCoW exercise that doesn't produce a credible Won't Have list hasn't really happened. You've just written a wish list in a different format.

What you get is a document that commits the room to the no, not just the yes. The Won't Have list is the artefact you take to the next argument.

So. How to run it.

List. Every requirement, every project, every commitment on the table. Not just the contested ones. The whole population.

Categorise. Each item goes into one of the four buckets. The buckets aren't equal — Must should be the smallest, Won't should be the largest. If Must dominates, the categorisation hasn't happened.

Won't. This is the move. Read the Won't Have column out loud. For each item, name who's going to be unhappy that it's there. If the answer is nobody on a Won't Have item, the item didn't earn its place — move it back to the discussion. If the answer is a specific senior stakeholder for every item, the list is honest.

Sign-off. The categorised list goes to the people who can override it, and they sign. Not nod. Sign. The document with their name on it is the artefact.

Check the calendar to prove the cuts landed

The third is

Resource Allocation audit.

This one is less a named tool and more a discipline — there's no canonical source, no named developer, no foundational text. It's a practice. Worth treating as a tool because the move it describes is what makes the previous two land.

The reason the discipline exists is that strategy documents are easy to produce; calendar changes are hard. The team can sign off on a Value vs Effort matrix, agree the MoSCoW categorisation, and walk out of the meeting carrying on with exactly the same week they were planning before. The cuts didn't happen — only the documentation of them did.

The unique insight is that the team's hours are the only honest record of priorities. What the calendar says is what the team is actually doing. What the strategy document says is what the team intends. When those two diverge, the strategy document is the lie.

What you get is a reality check after the cuts conversation. If the calendar changed, the cuts landed. If the calendar didn't change, the cuts are still pending.

So. How to run it.

Start by pulling the calendar — the team's hours, week by week, for the past month. Not the project plan. The actual diary.

Compare. Map the hours against the cuts conversation. The work you said you were stopping — is it still in the diary? The work you said you were prioritising — is it getting more hours, or the same hours under a new label?

Reallocate. Where the diary doesn't match the document, the document is wrong about reality. Either the cuts didn't actually happen, or the cuts happened and the team replaced the cut work with something nobody decided. Both need to surface and be argued.

The Value vs Effort matrix, MoSCoW, and the Resource Allocation audit all assume you're cutting in order to continue. There's a version of this scenario where the honest answer is different — where the question turns out to be not which projects to cut, but which structures the team is currently maintaining that should never have been one thing in the first place.

A precedent: subtracting by changing the shape

January twenty twenty-two. Emma Walmsley, chief executive of GSK, rebuffs three Unilever bids for the consumer healthcare business — Panadol, Sensodyne, Advil, Voltaren — the highest valuing the unit at fifty billion pounds. The bid sequence runs in mid-January; by the nineteenth, Unilever has walked away.

Walmsley's argument is structural rather than financial. GSK had been trying to run two companies inside one organisation — a consumer-goods business optimised for brand and distribution, and a biopharmaceutical business optimised for R and D — under a single management attention budget, a single capital allocation process, and a single strategic narrative.

Six months later, on the eighteenth of July twenty twenty-two, the consumer healthcare business lists on the London Stock Exchange as Haleon at thirty-one billion pounds. The largest European listing in more than a decade.

Walmsley's framing in the FT, around the listing: there was "a Gordian knot of GSK, in terms of balance sheet structure, funding for the future", which the demerger could untie.

The structural read holds. GSK had committed itself the year before — at the June twenty twenty-one investor update — to four therapeutic-area pillars and a commercial split that designated Vaccines and Specialty Medicines as the growth engines. The twenty twenty-two demerger was the structural move that made those commitments legible at the level of the organisation rather than the strategy deck. By February twenty twenty-five, GSK was ahead of its twenty twenty-six sales guidance and raising it.

The cut wasn't to ask the organisation to work harder inside the shape it had. The cut was to change the shape — recognising GSK had been two things and stopping running them as one.

That's a different shape of subtraction — not less of what you're already doing, but a different structure altogether. One more story before we close — a third route, where subtraction goes too far.

Findory. Early two-thousands.

A personalised news aggregator built by Greg Linden — a former Amazon engineer who had been one of the people behind Amazon's recommendation algorithm. The product was technically excellent. The algorithms were sophisticated for their time. The early users loved it. What killed Findory wasn't the product, and it wasn't the market. It was Linden's frugality.

He'd watched the dot-com crash from inside Amazon and was determined not to repeat the mistakes of that era. So he paid himself nothing. He hired no one. He bought the cheapest commodity hardware he could find. He spent nothing on marketing.

The runway, by virtue of these choices, was effectively infinite. But the company couldn't grow — because there was nobody to do the work that growth required, and nothing to make the work visible to the audience that needed to find it.

Linden wrote an unusually clear-eyed post-mortem afterwards. He named the trap directly. By avoiding the failure mode of the dot-com era — reckless spending — he'd walked into the opposite failure mode. Starvation. The frugality that prevented a quick death by burn rate had instead produced a slow death by under-investment.

So. LEGO subtracted to focus. Walmsley subtracted by changing the shape — recognising GSK had been two companies and stopping running them as one. Findory subtracted until there was nothing left to grow.

When you've been told to do more with less, the question worth asking isn't how much to cut. It's whether the cuts are the kind that make the remaining work better — or the kind that make the remaining work impossible. The two look identical on a spreadsheet. The only way to tell them apart is to ask what becomes harder as a result of the cut.

So. The question from this Playbook.

What's actually in your "won'T Have" list this quarter?

And if the answer is "nothing" — whose disappointment are you avoiding by refusing to say no?