Leidy Klotz is a professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Subtract. His research makes the case that our instinct to add before we ever consider taking away is one of the costliest and least examined habits in business, one that only compounds the longer a company has been building.

In this Tugboat Institute® Talk, Leidy traces the science behind that instinct, from a Lego bridge his son quietly improved by removing a block, to the deliberate subtraction built into games like Jenga, and makes the business case for treating subtraction as a genuine competitive advantage. For Evergreen® companies thinking in decades rather than quarters, he offers a practical way to ask not just what to build next, but what to prune along the way.