I went to Tuscany and I visited with a number one wine grower in the world and he walked me through

the science of pruning and then I went to a botany university and all this kind of stuff and

here's what they told me. That's Dr. Henry Cloud, a psychologist in New York Times best-selling

author and he's not talking about horticulture. He's talking about pruning in business and life in

order to prompt the kind of growth that we need to scale. This is key, Joel, that you don't go

just prune a tree or prune a bush or prune a vine because it looks, you know, overgrown. That's

why we do it at my house. But what the experts tell you is you don't start pruning. You start with

the vision of what you want that wine or the vine or that bush to look like and then you prune

towards the vision and that is really, really key. We're not just hacking away to hack away or to

cut expenses or stuff like that. You start with what you want the place to look like, what you want

a team to look like, what you want the organization to look like and you start there and then you have

to ask, okay, what doesn't fit that vision? That question about vision, that's a vital one. I'm Joel

Miller. I'm the Chief Product Officer here at Full Focus and that's what we're wrestling with

today on the Business Accelerator podcast. And I know what you're thinking. Isn't this lead to win?

We'll come back to that in a second.

The problem of pruning is everywhere. Lidy Klotz is a professor at the University of Virginia.

He's been studying this challenge for years now. He studied the strategic planning process of

his university and discovered, for one example, out of 750 ideas for improvements, fewer than 10 percent

suggested removing, subtracting or pruning anything. Every other change was additive.

That's typically our default, but very often this actually adds to our problems.

Administering the fix requires more resources, more effort, more bandwidth, more time. Meanwhile,

the quickest way to improvement is usually carving away the useless, the unproductive and the unprofitable.

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