How I Turned Around a Red-Ink Company at 43

A vivid chapter in our CFO's career: when a foreign asset manager's Japan unit was sinking, he took the president's seat at forty-three on a promise to turn it around. His first move, in one line from his essay: "Secure profitability through selection and concentration — pour our limited people only into businesses that earn."

Result: profitable in two years; four years later, two billion yen in operating profit, the team grown from five to thirty. No magic — he simply stopped doing everything. Which is the hardest thing of all, because choosing means discarding, and discarding takes the resolve to be resented and to answer for mistakes.

Most leaders flee into "a little of everything" and render everything mediocre. He had the courage to discard — so what remained grew. Strategy is deciding what not to do. What can't you discard right now?

What do you work for?