LIFO Leadership: The Bottleneck of Excitability

In accounting, LIFO stands for Last In, First Out. The last item added is the first one acted on.

In leadership—especially entrepreneurial leadership—it shows up like this:

A founder has an idea in the shower, gets excited, shares it with the team, and suddenly... it becomes the most urgent project. Never mind that there are three unfinished initiatives in motion. This new thing feels fresh, important, visionary.

And everyone pivots—again.

This creates a culture of reactivity over priority, where direction shifts not based on impact or alignment, but on adrenaline.

From a Less Doing standpoint, LIFO leadership is the opposite of optimization.

• It ignores the Ultimate KPI: Are we actually moving the right things off the founder’s plate?
• It bypasses systems, dumping new tasks outside of any workflow.
• It destroys delegation because no one knows what’s still real.

The fix?

• Run all tasks through a trusted project management system.
• Set up an idea intake process—ideas go into a queue, not the task list.
• Communicate asynchronously so every idea doesn’t feel urgent.
• Teach founders the difference between what’s exciting and what’s essential.

Because in a company that scales, the last idea in doesn’t get to be first out.

Let me know if you want this as a slide deck or a checklist version to share with your team.

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