Bottleneck Targeting

Definition

Sull and Eisenhardt's three-step method for building a strategy of simple rules is: (1) figure out what will "move the needles" — the small number of choices that widen the gap between two competing forces (for a company, revenue versus cost; for a person, what energizes you versus what drains you); (2) identify the bottleneck — the one recurring activity or decision that is actually constraining that gap; and (3) craft rules narrowly for that bottleneck, rather than for the organization or life in general. Rules written before the bottleneck is identified tend to be generic and unfocused; rules aimed precisely at the bottleneck can be a handful of guidelines and still move the whole system.

In the Book

The method comes from Don Sull's multi-year "simple rules" program at London Business School, run with over three dozen Young Presidents' Organization companies between 2011 and 2014 — including eToro, the trading platform whose founder Yoni Assia discovered almost by accident that an incidental chat feature, not the trading platform itself, was what kept novice users engaged and converted them into traders. The book frames profit as the gap between two parallel "needles" (revenue and cost) and argues managers are tempted to skip straight to writing rules without first locating the bottleneck that's actually holding the gap back. Chapter 6 extends the identical three-step process to individuals: readers are walked through diagnostic questions ("What aspect of your life do you most want to improve?", "What will you regret not changing in five years?") to find their personal needles, then told to prefer bottlenecks that are recurrent rather than one-off (how a couple handles money disagreements, not whom to marry), because only recurring bottlenecks generate enough repetitions to test and refine rules against, and are illustrated with individuals who used the method to craft rules for online dating, managing depression, and becoming more charismatic.

Why It Matters

This method separates two failure modes that get conflated in most goal-setting advice: having the wrong goal, and having the right goal but the wrong lever. Writing rules before locating the bottleneck produces broadly reasonable-sounding guidelines that don't move anything, because effort gets spread across the whole system instead of concentrated at the one point of highest leverage. The method generalizes past strategy or self-help to any situation where you're deciding where to spend a scarce design effort — engineering, policy, coaching — by insisting the target (the bottleneck) be identified and validated as recurrent and measurable before any rule gets written for it.