I’ve watched leadership teams spend days creating six strategic pillars, fourteen objectives, and beautifully designed documents. Three months later, almost nobody can tell you what they were.
If people can’t remember something, they can’t use it.
It sounds almost insultingly simple: make things memorable. But I’ve watched smart leaders at good companies invest enormous energy into goals and values that don’t actually have any effect on behavior — not because they got the strategy wrong, but because they made things too complex for it to stick.
If your goals aren’t memorable, they’re not useful. If you have fourteen company values, people will remember three. And they won’t all remember the same three.
When people can’t hold something in their head, they can’t use it to make decisions. They fall back on something else — their own instincts, their manager’s preferences, whatever feels urgent in the moment.
Ultimately, your job as a leader is to create structure that shapes the decisions pe…
