The Cost of “Good Enough”
Why Leaders Have to Let Go to Compound
By Bryan J. Kaus
“Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.”
— John D. Rockefeller
Rockefeller’s line gets repeated so often it’s basically become business wallpaper. Every leadership book quotes it. Every transformation deck references it. Every pivot press release implies it.
But if you strip away the motivational gloss, there’s a hard operating principle underneath:
At a certain point, “good” stops being a strength and quietly becomes a ceiling.
You see it in portfolios that drift.
You see it in companies that optimize around the edges while the core stagnates.
You see it in careers that plateau and health that slides.
And in 2025, you absolutely see it in how we’re fumbling through AI.
This isn’t about heroics or burning platforms. It’s about the discipline to recognize when an asset, a strategy, or even a role is maxed out—and having the courage to reallocate, not just tinker.
How “Good” Becomes a Ceiling
There’s a pattern I see repeatedly with leaders, investors, and frankly with myself:
We hang on to what’s working “well enough.”
We rationalize the drag because it used to be a win. We confuse loyalty with stewardship, sunk cost with strategy. Pride takes over where discipline should be.
A few versions of this show up everywhere:
The Portfolio Version
You bought a stock five years ago. It compounded nicely for a while. It’s not breaking out anymore, but it’s not broken either. So you hold. And hold. And hold.
You tell yourself: “It’s a good name. I know it. I’ve done well here.”
Meanwhile, your original thesis has aged out, the industry structure has shifted, or you just have better uses for that capital. But because this position is “good,” it never gets the scrutiny you’d give a loser.
Great portfolios aren’t built by riding every winner into irrelevance. They’re built by trimming and rotating when the gap between potential and probable closes.
The Business-Unit Version
Every large company has a business like this: It throws off cash. It’s familiar. It’s “what we’ve always done.”
But if you’re honest, it’s no longer where the company’s edge lives.
Leaders talk transformation, launch pilots, rebrand a bit, tweak pricing. But the core portfolio never really changes. The result is what I’d call disruptive incrementalism—a lot of motion, not a lot of trajectory.
You optimize the “good” instead of confronting whether it still deserves its share of capital, talent, and leadership attention.
The Personal Version
Individually, we do the same thing: The job that was once a stretch becomes a comfort zone. The compensation is “good,” the title is “good,” the brand name is “good.”
Meanwhile, your growth curve has flattened, your health is sliding, and your energy goes mostly to maintenance instead of building.
You don’t have to hate something for it to be getting in your way. “Good” is often the most dangerous state, because nothing is obviously on fire—and that’s exactly how mediocrity sneaks in.
When Companies Let Go on Purpose
The Rockefeller principle isn’t merely a motivational point. The best companies and people are the ones who actually operationalize it.
Procter & Gamble: Pruning a Forest to Save the Trees
A decade ago, P&G had roughly 160 brands. Then leadership made a hard call: cut the portfolio roughly in half and focus on 70–80 core strategic brands representing about 90% of sales.
They weren’t cutting disasters. Many of those brands were fine businesses. But “fine” wasn’t enough to justify the complexity, capital, and management bandwidth they consumed.
That’s spring cleaning at scale: shedding low-growth, low-moat units so Tide, Pampers, Gillette, and Old Spice could get disproportionate attention and resources.
That’s what “giving up the good to go for the great” looks like in a real P&L.
Nestlé: Saying No to Candy to Double Down on Growth
Nestlé sold its entire U.S. confectionery business - brands like Butterfinger, Baby Ruth, and Nerds - to Ferrero for about $2.8 billion. This wasn’t a tiny side hustle; the unit generated roughly $900 million in annual sales.
But it was structurally weaker, trailing larger competitors in a slower-growth category. Leadership made a deliberate shift toward higher-growth, more strategically aligned spaces: coffee, pet care, infant nutrition, health-oriented products.
That’s a classic Rockefeller move: walking away from a good franchise to free up balance sheet and management focus for where the future actually is.
IBM: Separating “Good Service” from the Growth Engine
IBM’s spin-off of its managed infrastructure services unit into Kyndryl is another case. The services business wasn’t a disaster; it was a large, long-standing revenue stream.
But IBM’s leadership recognized that if they wanted to compete at scale in hybrid cloud and AI, they couldn’t keep steering a hundred-year-old conglomerate with a mixed identity. So they separated the infrastructure unit and doubled down on cloud, software, and AI-driven solutions.
“Good” services revenue had become a strategic distraction. Spinning it off was less about cutting the past and more about clarifying the future.
The AI Era: A New “Good Enough” Trap
AI just gives us a fresh canvas to replay the same dynamic.
Right now we’re seeing three patterns:
Some companies are openly citing AI as a reason for layoffs - tens of thousands of cuts across tech and services in 2025 alone. In a few cases, early wins on cost are followed by quiet walk-backs when service quality and customer trust erode.
On the other side, a meaningful number of organizations have responded by banning or heavily restricting generative AI tools over privacy and security concerns. Banks, tech firms, even Congress have taken this path at various points.
Then you have executives trying to thread the needle: using AI to take repetitive work off employees’ plates - spreadsheets, email churn, basic supplier communications - so humans can refocus on higher-value work.
Here’s the risk:
If you treat AI purely as a way to make today’s “good enough” cheaper, you’ll use it exactly wrong.
You’ll strip out people and processes that carry institutional knowledge, judgment, and nuance. You may get a quarter or two of margin relief - but you also hollow out the very capabilities you need to compete when everyone else has the same tools.
The better question isn’t “How many jobs can this replace?”
It’s: “What work no longer deserves to be done by a human, so we can redeploy that human to something higher-return?”
That’s the same Rockefeller logic, applied at the task level. Letting go of the “good” busywork - manual reconciliations, low-leverage reporting, endless status decks - is what allows you to compound where it matters: customer insight, product development, risk management, deal-making.
AI doesn’t change the principle. It just accelerates the consequences of how you apply it.
Pride, Narrative, and Why We Hold On
Why is it so hard to let go of “good”?
Because good is usually tied to us.
We built that product line. We pushed that strategy through the organization. We picked that role, that house, that investment.
To admit that “good” is now a drag feels like saying we were wrong back then. So we defend the legacy. We stretch the narrative. We wait for one more cycle, one more quarter, one more reorg.
That’s true in the boardroom and in our personal balance sheets.
The truth is more nuanced: what was right then may not be right now. Strategy is path-dependent; the world moves. Recognizing that isn’t an indictment of your past decisions, rather it’s evidence that you’re still awake.
The job of a leader and I’d include “leader of your own life” in that category - is to keep re-underwriting the portfolio. Businesses, assets, relationships, habits. If you wouldn’t buy them today given what you now know, you at least have to ask why you’re still holding them.
The Portfolio Test, the P&L Test, and the Personal Test
At some point this stops being theoretical. Leaders, shareholders, and individuals all face their own version of the same question.
The Portfolio Test
If you manage capital - your own or others’ - ask:
Which positions still match the thesis you wrote down when you bought them?
Which are you holding mostly because they’re familiar or “have treated you well”?
If you had cash in hand today, would you re-buy them at current prices?
If the honest answer is no, then you’re not investing anymore. You’re curating a museum of past good decisions. “Good” positions that no longer earn their keep are tax on the great ideas you’re not funding.
The P&L Test
If you run a company, a business unit, or even a function:
Which businesses, product lines, or projects are “fine” but clearly not where the future sits?
Where is complexity outpacing the value it delivers?
What are you carrying out of sentiment - legacy brands, pet projects, “strategic” initiatives that haven’t moved a real metric in years?
Those are the candidates for Rockefeller-style decisions: divest or sunset, spin out, or radically shrink and refocus.
The goal isn’t brutality. It’s stewardship. Your job is to reallocate talent and capital to the highest and best use, not maintain a museum of yesterday’s wins.
The Personal Test
Then there’s the uncomfortable part: us.
Is your current role still stretching you, or just paying you?
Are your habits - how you eat, move, rest, and think - setting up the next decade, or just coping with this one (or this month/week/day)?
Are you still playing the game you chose, or just defending the identity you built around it?
Not everything is under your control - health events, family crises, macro shocks, the randomness of corporate restructurings. But a lot of what shows up in our “performance” as people - wealth, health, capability- is compounded from decisions we do control:
What we say yes to.
What we keep tolerating.
What we’re unwilling to walk away from.
“Letting go of good” in a personal context might look like leaving a safe role that no longer aligns with who you are or what you can do. Finally addressing health in a serious, structured way instead of telling yourself you’ll get to it later. Rebalancing your time toward building something that actually compounds - skills, relationships, assets - rather than just feeding the current quarter.
Small, honest course corrections now are how you avoid the “whacked upside the head” version later.
A Few Practical Filters
If you lead anything - a portfolio, a P&L, a team, a life … here are a few filters I use:
Name the ceiling. Ask explicitly: What is this asset’s realistic upside from here? Stop treating every “good” as if it has infinite optionality.
Separate gratitude from allocation. You can honor what a business, role, or habit did for you and still decide it doesn’t deserve tomorrow’s capital.
Track by return on marginal effort, not legacy contribution. Where does the next dollar or hour generate the highest compounding, not just the least pain?
Beware complexity creep. If a product, process, or initiative adds more coordination than capability, put it on the watchlist.
Use AI to clear the lane, not clear the bench. Automate the low-leverage “good enough” tasks so humans can move up the value curve instead of out the door.
Schedule real portfolio reviews - of money, business lines, and life. Once or twice a year, step back and ask: What am I only keeping because it’s familiar?
Make a few decisive moves instead of 100 tiny tweaks. You don’t cross a chasm in two small jumps. At some point, you have to commit.
The Point Taken
Change is not an indictment of past decisions.
Letting go of “good” is not betrayal.
It’s the work of anyone serious about building something that lasts.
Whether you’re pruning a brand portfolio, rewriting an AI roadmap, or reevaluating your own career and health, the question is the same:
What are you willing to release so that the next chapter can actually be great—and not just a slightly more efficient version of where you’ve already been?
That’s the Rockefeller test.
Where, in your world, is “good enough” quietly holding back what could be great?