Tech culture is very fond of persistence, stubbornness, perseverance, and the idea that you should never give up. We’re surrounded by stories of visionaries who were told they’d never succeed and went on to change the world. But sometimes, you should put selection bias aside and, yes, give up.

This applies to big companies perhaps even more than for startups. Big companies have entire strategy teams devoted to working out what to do next and how to do it, and budgets to hire strategy consulting firms for millions of $ to produce 100-page decks with more strategies and ways to achieve them. Such people have little interest in saying ‘give up – it won’t work’ (perhaps because that might mean you don’t need a strategy team anymore). And there’s no SmartArt for failure.

Microsoft today, I think, is a case study in knowing when you should indeed give up, and what you should do after that.

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