Hamish Mackenzie
- 1 min read

Dead arm strategy

Dead arm disease is something that affects wine grape vines. A fungus infects one part of the vine and causes it to wither and die. But that's not the interesting part.

What's interesting is that the stem of the vine continues to absorb the same volume of nutrients as before, but now has fewer grapes to pump them into. The result is that the surviving part of the vine produces grapes with a more intense flavour, which is then transferred into the wine that they produce. So, what has this got to do with your business?

As I've said before, now is the perfect time to fix things in your business, regardless of whether they were already broken before the crisis, or have been broken by it.

One of the things you can do is let failing products or divisions die, or wither on the vine. That will enable you to focus more resources into the parts of the business that are already doing well, and make them even better.

Your benefit? A sweeter level of success. I call this approach dead arm strategy.