Kieran Gilmurray is an Internationally acclaimed expert in leadership, AI, strategy and transformation.
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Strategic subtraction helps leaders remove work, complexity, and friction without weakening the capabilities that make an organisation resilient. The challenge is distinguishing genuine waste from the capacity, controls, and flexibility that protect performance.
This episode explores how leaders can use strategic subtraction to create value through better operating design rather than crude cost reduction.
TLDR / At a Glance
• Strategic subtraction versus cost cutting • Efficiency, resilience, and prominence • Waste versus useful organisational slack • Elimination, substitution, and consolidation • Pausing, hiding, and abstraction • Protecting capability while removing drag
The key is to remove what no longer deserves attention while strengthening the system that remains.
If you are leading your businesses strategic transformation and need greater clarity, stronger execution and measurable results, let’s connect.
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AI Transparency Notice: This podcast uses a hybrid format. When an episode features one of Kieran Gilmurray’s written articles, the narration is generated using a synthetic clone of his voice via ElevenLabs AI (the underlying article text is entirely human-authored). Episode descriptions and summaries are assisted by AI and should be considered unedited by a human unless specified.
The Difference Between Cutting and Creating Value Introduction This is the second of three articles on strategic subtraction, a practical discipline within strategic intelligence. Part one explored why leaders keep adding work, meetings, tools and controls, even when the organization would benefit more from removing them. Recognizing the need to subtract is only the beginning. The harder judgment is deciding what can be removed without weakening capability, resilience, or customer value. This article looks at the difference between crude cutting and strategic subtraction. The goal is to remove the work and complexity that consume capacity without creating enough value, so attention and resources can move to the priorities that matter most. Why subtraction gets confused with cutting? The confusion is understandable. Cutting and strategic subtraction both involve taking something away. Both can reduce activity. Both can reduce spend. Both may make the organization appear leaner, but the intent is different. Ordinary cutting is usually cost led. It begins with budgets, expense lines, headcount targets, and immediate savings. Strategic subtraction is value led. It begins with the work itself. It asks which activities consume more focus, coordination, time, risk, or complexity than they create in value. That distinction is critical because a business can remove people but leave the broken workflow intact. It can reduce spend but preserve duplicated reporting. It can cut a team while leaving unclear decision rights, excessive meetings, fragmented tools, and overlapping governance untouched. That is not strategic subtraction. It is pressure transferred into the system. Strategic subtraction asks a more demanding question. What should no longer exist because it slows execution, dilutes focus, weakens customer experience, or absorbs scarce leadership attention. Cutting asks what can be removed quickly. Strategic subtraction asks what should no longer exist.
The triple test efficiency, resilience, and prominence. A useful way to judge strategic subtraction is through three tests efficiency, resilience, and prominence. Efficiency asks whether the subtraction reduces unnecessary time, cost, effort, duplication, handoffs, or complexity. This is the most obvious benefit. Many organizations are full of low value work, repeated approvals, duplicated reports, unnecessary meetings, overlapping tools, stale dashboards, legacy processes, and customer steps that nobody would design today. Asana reports that knowledge workers spend 60% of their time on work about work, including chasing updates, unnecessary meetings, and coordination overhead. Atlassian reports that executives estimate only 24% of team effort is truly mission critical. Microsoft's research on the infinite workday describes working patterns fragmented by meetings, interruptions, and after hours communication. Taken together, these findings point to a deeper issue. Many organizations are carrying more coordination burden than their people, workflows, and priorities can absorb. Resilience asks whether the subtraction protects or strengthens the organization's ability to adapt, recover, maintain service, and avoid brittleness. This is where strategic subtraction most clearly departs from crude cost cutting. A move can look efficient on a spreadsheet while making the organization more fragile in practice. A supply chain with no buffer can look efficient until disruption arrives. A control process can look slow until a regulatory failure exposes why it existed. A safety review can look like overhead until poor quality creates a much larger cost later. Some capacity is waste, some capacity is resilience. Prominence asks whether the subtraction improves visibility, trust, customer experience, stakeholder confidence, reputation, or strategic distinctiveness. This is the least familiar test, but it matters. Strategic subtraction should make what matters easier to see. It should clarify the offer, improve the customer journey, reduce friction, strengthen trust, or sharpen the organization's strategic identity. A business does not create value simply by becoming smaller. It creates value when removal makes the system clearer, stronger, and more useful to the people it serves.
Why efficiency alone is dangerous? Efficiency is attractive because it is easy to measure. Costs fall, hours are saved, reports disappear, cycle times shorten, headcount may reduce, but efficiency without resilience can become a false economy. The COVID period made this visible in global supply chains. Just in time, models had created major efficiency advantages for years, but many organizations discovered that thin inventories, concentrated suppliers, and limited visibility could amplify disruption. The lesson is not that lean systems are bad, the lesson is that efficiency must be designed with resilience, not pursued as an isolated objective. The same logic applies in regulated and safety critical sectors. In banking, data governance, monitoring, audit trails, and controls can all look burdensome until they fail. The OCC's 2024 Amended Enforcement Action Against Citibank highlighted weaknesses in data quality management and regulatory reporting processes. It is a useful warning. What can look like internal process overhead may become regulatory, operational, and reputational risk when controls are not strong enough. In healthcare, aviation, and manufacturing, the same principle applies. Capacity, quality checks, training, testing, and process discipline may look costly until their absence creates a much larger failure. This is why leaders must distinguish waste from Slack. Waste absorbs resources without strategic purpose. Slack can provide adaptability, recovery capacity, learning time, quality assurance, or operational safety. Strategic subtraction removes the former while protecting the latter.
The seven ways to subtract strategically. Strategic subtraction is not one move. It can take several forms. Elimination means removing a component, step, rule, approval, report, meeting, product, or handoff entirely. It is useful when an activity has no defensible user, risk, revenue, or strategic purpose. AKEA's decision to discontinue its printed catalog is a simple example. The catalogue was iconic, but customer behavior had shifted, so removing the print channel reduced production and distribution burden, allowed product information to be updated more easily, and freed resources for more valuable customer experience and digital activity. Substitution means replacing a complex route with a simpler alternative that delivers the same or better outcome. Zipline's medical drone delivery work in Rwanda is a strong example. By replacing slower road-based delivery with drone logistics for urgent medical supplies, hospitals could receive critical blood products faster and more reliably, while reducing the risk that perishable supplies expired before they were used. Substitution means replacing a complex route with a simpler alternative that delivers the same or better outcome. Zipline's medical drone delivery work in Rwanda is a strong example. By substituting slower road-based delivery with drone logistics for urgent medical supplies, the model improved reach, reduced delay, and reduced wastage in critical healthcare supply. Consolidation means combining fragmented activities, platforms, teams, workflows, or touch points into a more coherent system. Estonia's digital government model is useful here. Its X-Road infrastructure and once-only principle reduce repeated data requests and fragmented citizen interactions. Consolidation removes duplication, but only works well when the common platform is resilient and well governed. Hiding means reducing visible complexity while preserving access to depth when needed. Not all complexity can be eliminated. Some regulation, risk, detail, and exception handling must remain. The leadership task is to stop pushing unnecessary complexity onto employees or customers at every interaction, while still preserving auditability, escalation, and transparency when required. Pausing means temporarily suspending projects, initiatives, features, investments, or processes without destroying future optionality. This is useful when the organization is overloaded, uncertainty is high, or dependencies are unresolved. Netflix's pause membership feature shows the principle in a customer context because it preserves the relationship rather than forcing a hard cancellation. Abstraction means creating a simplified interface over complex backend operations. A WS is a familiar example. It allows teams to use infrastructure services without managing every physical or technical layer themselves. Done well, abstraction removes unnecessary burden from users while preserving operational control behind the scenes. Each type of subtraction has value. Each also has risk. Elimination can remove hidden controls, consolidation can create concentration risk, hiding can reduce transparency, pausing can become avoidance. Abstraction can distance leaders from operational reality. That is why strategic subtraction requires judgment, not slogans.
Strategic subtraction must protect capability. The most important warning is simple. Subtraction should remove drag, not muscle. Removing people before removing broken work is usually a bad sign. It suggests leaders have attacked the visible call space without asking why the work became slow, duplicated, expensive, or frustrating in the first place. A better sequence is to examine the system first. Where are handoffs multiplying? Where are decisions waiting? Which reports are produced but not used? Which tools overlap? Which approvals protect real risk, and which exist because of old incidents, old politics, or old habits? Which customer steps create reassurance and which simply transfer burden to the customer. This is where strategic subtraction becomes a management discipline rather than a financial reaction. Peter Drucker's idea of planned abandonment is useful here. Leaders should regularly ask whether they would start an activity again today, knowing what they now know. Michael Porter's work on trade-offs adds the strategy lens. Advantage depends not only on what an organization chooses to do, but also on what it chooses not to do. Richard Rumel's work on coherent strategy reinforces the point. Weak strategy often becomes a collection of disconnected priorities. Strong strategy concentrates effort. Strategic subtraction is how that concentration becomes practical.
Questions leaders should ask now. Strategic subtraction requires better questions than where can we save money? Leaders should ask what work creates more coordination burden than value? What are we funding because it existed last year, not because it matters this year? Which controls protect real risk and which duplicate other controls? Which meetings, reports, dashboards, tools or approvals slow decisions without improving quality? Where have we removed cost but left the broken work intact? What should be paused rather than killed? What complexity should be hidden from users but retained for auditability or resilience? What would improve efficiency, resilience, and prominence at the same time? These questions change the leadership conversation. They move subtraction away from crude financial reduction and toward operating design.
What this means for leaders. The leadership challenge is not simply recognizing that something should be removed. It is knowing whether removal will create value or weaken the system. Crude cutting removes what is easiest to count. Strategic subtraction removes what no longer deserves the organization's attention, capacity, or coordination effort. The best leaders do not ask only what can be taken away. They ask what can be removed so the organization becomes more efficient, more resilient, and more valuable to the people it serves. Part three will explore how leaders can turn strategic subtraction into a repeatable leadership discipline so removal becomes deliberate, governed, and trusted rather than reactive or political.
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