Every time I or a business I work with gets stuck, I realize we have drifted away from what is important. There’s a popular Arab proverb: Do you want to eat the grapes or fight the guard? Strategy is about the grapes; it’s the courage to face the real problem before rushing into solutions. By using data, we can strip away the noise and the internal boardroom assumptions to find the core issue. In the end, the real edge doesn’t come from doing everything; it comes from daring to focus on less and doing it better.

When business numbers drop, the usual suspects appear: marketing, sales, or the market itself. We rush to patch symptoms, yet rarely investigate the system to name the problem for what it truly is. Defining the problem is everything. Once that’s clear, focus is no longer a guessing game; it’s a choice to let everything else fall away. Most of the time, we over-complicate the investigation, only to realize the problem is as simple as Sherlock Holmes finally noticing he’s out of dip for the party.