New leaders love a good demolition test. Six weeks into a new role, they find a budget line they don’t understand, they zero it out, and they wait to see who screams. If nobody screams loud enough or fast enough, the program gets labeled “non-essential” and stays dead. It feels like decisiveness. It’s not.

The seduction of the quick cut

Cutting something is fast, visible, and cheap to execute. It signals action and generates an immediate number on a spreadsheet (savings realized, cost avoided) that looks fantastic in a quarterly update. And if nothing visibly breaks in the first month, the leader gets to claim credit for finding “waste” that everyone else was too comfortable to touch.

What this move never accounts for is time lag. When you cut a program, the consequences don’t show immediately, they slowly unveil over time. Through customer defection, morale decay, and institutional knowledge walking out the door. By the time the damage is visible enough to act on, it’s no longer a line-item fix. It’s a rebuild, and those always cost more than maintenance ever would have.

Exhibit A: JCPenney’s coupon experiment

In 2012, Ron Johnson arrived at JCPenney with an Apple pedigree and a theory: coupons, markdowns, and constant promotions were gimmicks beneath a modern retailer. He eliminated them almost overnight in favor of clean, “everyday fair” pricing. On paper, it was rational. Coupons are expensive to administer, and the psychology of manufactured discounts can look manipulative from a spreadsheet perspective.

What Johnson didn’t do first was understand the function those promotions actually served for JCPenney’s core shopper. The pricing shift applied to merchandise customers were already used to buying at a discount, rather than to new merchandise, and Penney’s bargain-hunting customer base didn’t respond well.

The result was sales fell 25% in a single year, stripping the company of $4.3 billion in revenue. Johnson was gone in seventeen months. Penney brought back the coupons, the markdowns, and the promotional calendar he’d torn out, but the customers who’d built shopping habits around that experience didn’t come back at the same rate. You can reinstate a program. You cannot always reinstate the trust that made it work.

Exhibit B: Southwest’s technology “savings”

Southwest didn’t cut a program in a single dramatic memo, it just chose, year after year, not to fund the scheduling infrastructure its own people were flagging as fragile. Employee representatives had been warning for roughly five or six years that the airline needed serious investment in IT infrastructure and scheduling software, given its point-to-point network. The company kept treating that investment as deferrable, a function nobody fully understood the downstream value of, so it was easy to underfund.

Then a single winter storm found every crack. Southwest canceled more flights than usual, including more than 60% of its schedule on two of the worst days, in a meltdown that ran from December 21 to 30, 2022. The airline itself estimated it lost between $725 million and $825 million from the disruption, and federal regulators later hit the company with a record $140 million fine for how poorly it handled passengers during and after the failure. That’s before you count the reputational cost, the congressional hearings, or the shareholder lawsuit alleging the company had downplayed the risk. An underfunded system that “worked fine” for years became, in ten days, a nine-figure catastrophe, and the fix still required the very investment leadership had spent years avoiding.

The math nobody runs before cutting

In both cases, and in nearly every version of this story I’ve watched play out in consulting work, the sequence is the same:

1. A leader cuts or underfunds something without mapping what function it actually serves.

2. The absence doesn’t register immediately, because organizations run on inertia and goodwill longer than anyone expects.

3. The failure, when it arrives, arrives all at once and publicly.

4. Rebuilding costs more than the original program ever did, because you’re now paying for the fix, the reputational repair, the regulatory scrutiny, and the re-acquisition of customers or trust you lost in the interim.

“See what breaks” isn’t a controlled experiment. A controlled experiment has a hypothesis. This has a body count.

What Alahuhta did instead

Contrast this with how Matti Alahuhta approached the CEO seat at KONE. He described his first challenge as acquiring an in-depth understanding of the company as quickly as possible, in order to establish a basis for change. Not to justify the changes he’d already decided to make before he walked in the door. (Worth noting: KONE was already performing rather well as a company when he arrived.) He wasn’t inheriting a crisis that demanded emergency triage, but he still chose to understand before he acted.

That’s the discipline many new leaders skip, precisely because their situations feel more urgent than his did. Urgency is exactly when the skipped step costs the most.

Function and purpose come first — always

If you can’t trace a program back to the behavior it drives and the customer experience it protects, you don’t understand it well enough to cut it responsibly, you only understand it well enough to guess. So before you touch a line item, answer one question in a single sentence: what function does this serve, and for whom? If you can’t answer that, the problem isn’t the budget line. It’s that nobody, including you, has mapped how intent turns into on-the-ground behavior in your organization.

Cutting to “see what breaks” isn’t leadership. It’s outsourcing your due diligence to your customers and hoping they don’t notice until the bill comes due. They notice, and the cost is always bigger than the number you thought you were saving. Understand the function first. Then decide what deserves to stay.

About the Author

Trained as an organizational behavioral scientist and customer-centricity expert, Andrea Belk Olson helps companies operationalize corporate strategy through transforming mindsets and behaviors. She is the author of three business books, including her most recent, What To Ask: How To Learn What Customers Need but Don’t Tell You.

She is a 4x ADDY award winner and contributing writer to Entrepreneur Magazine, Harvard Business Review, INC Magazine, World Economic Forum, and more. Andrea is also an applied entrepreneurship instructor at the University of Iowa and TEDx speaker coach.

More information is also available on www.pragmadik.com and www.andreabelkolson.com.