Long Idea #1 - Growth by Subtraction

My first lesson in growth by subtraction came from my maternal grandmother, Martha.

She grew up on a small farm in Fayetteville, Tennessee, and always had a vegetable garden. Because Martha (aka, Grandmother) was basically my favorite person in the world, I would follow her out to the garden. I might get put to work, but that was okay because work resembles fun when it happens alongside a kind, lit-up, and laughing person like Grandmother.

One job I could do was pinch off suckers. No garden in the South was complete without tomato plants, and Grandmother showed me how new sprouts would appear in the crooks of the bigger, more established vines and stems. She called these sprouts “suckers” and said we needed to pinch them off. Grandmother explained that, when left alone, suckers would keep growing and take up water and nutrients that should go to the tips of the vines and stems. There, they could become flowers and then tomatoes.

To an inquisitive kid like me, pruning tomato plants seemed backwards. How do you get more tomatoes when you have less, er, plant? I certainly hadn’t learned addition by subtraction in math class.

Grandmother always provided the proof later though: mounds of beautiful tomatoes, more than enough to share with her daughter’s family and the neighbors.

Pinch off suckers, get higher yields. Growth by subtraction. Right you are, Grandmother.

It’s funny how such childhood lessons have to be dressed up and reintroduced later in life. I remembered that homegrown lesson from Grandmother only after I became an entrepreneur and started seeing growth by subtraction everywhere. Consider these three instances:

• In Adagia, first published in 1500, the Dutch priest, Desiderius Erasmus, gave us this adage in Latin: Duos insequens lepores, neutrum capit. “Chasing two hares, he catches neither.” Or, to state the inverse, pick one objective, not two, and you’re more likely to succeed.
• After being appointed Braun’s Director of Design in 1961, the German designer, Dieter Rams, began developing and articulating the company’s design philosophy in his “Ten Principles for Good Design.” At their heart was a single idea: Weniger, aber besser. Less, but better. Eliminate to improve.
• In 2023, the Canadian marketer, Katelyn Bourgoin, posted an X thread about her business growth, which started with this tweet: “My little one-person business made $127,305 in January / How? Subtraction.” Grow by subtraction.

Taken together, these three examples start to sound like a joke: “A Dutch priest, German designer, and Canadian marketer walk into a bar.” Separated by five hundred years and differences in culture, language, geography, worldview, and occupation, they all arrive at the same realization as my gardening grandmother. Strategic subtraction produces superior results.

That same counterintuitive discovery awaits the ambitious entrepreneur, the curious scientist, the passionate artist, the analytical engineer, and even the smart-but-kinda-lazy student.

One of the more famous stories about growth by subtraction unfolded after Steve Jobs returned to Apple in July 1997. At the time Apple had roughly 350 active products and projects. Jobs described the product strategy as a “mess” at Macworld in August 1997, and over the ensuing months, he and Jony Ive developed the now-famous 2x2 product matrix (Consumer vs. Professional, Desktop vs. Portable) and cut 97% of the lineup. By the middle of 1998, Apple had only 10 products.

Apple’s numbers speak to the difference that strategic subtraction made. In 1997 the company had $7.1 billion in revenue in the 1997 fiscal year and lost $1.04 billion—the worst performance in company history. However, in 1998 Apple had an eye-popping turnaround, with $309 million in profit. Revenue rebounded to $6.1 billion in 1999, and profits kept climbing.

As impressive as Apple’s turnaround is in hindsight, it contains a sobering truth about growth by subtraction and many of the other long ideas I plan to share. Long ideas can help you “avoid common ways of failing,” as Charlie Munger would say, but they aren’t easy to implement. They won’t make you popular. They raise eyebrows. As Howard Marks observes in his book, The Most Important Thing, extraordinary results in business require deviating from what’s considered normal: “The problem is that extraordinary performance comes only from correct nonconsensual forecasts, but nonconsensual forecasts are hard to make, hard to make correctly and hard to act on.”

Deviation confuses or even angers some people, many of them your former admirers and fans. People will think you’re crazy for months or years unless and until your point of view, strategy, and actions prove to be correct.

The point is, we can agree with growth by subtraction from a philosophical standpoint, but we still have to muster the courage to turn principle into pruning shears.

It’s worth noting, too, that pinching suckers off tomatoes is easier than pinching sucker off companies. Apple had sunk billions into developing product lines that became so much trash on the cutting room floor. Revenue went down before it went back up.

So prepare to be misunderstood as you find the courage to consolidate your focus and grow by subtraction.

I leave you for now with this two-part question:

• What is my best opportunity right now?
• And what will I courageously cut so that I can funnel more resources into that opportunity?