There Are No Silver Bullets Only Lead Bullets

When a company faces a core, existential threat—such as a competitor's product being fundamentally superior—the leadership team will feel an intense pressure to find a "silver bullet."

A silver bullet is a clever strategic maneuver designed to avoid a direct, painful confrontation with the core problem. Examples include:

Pivoting to a different, less competitive market segment.
Trying to acquire a company to solve the problem.
Shifting the business model.

While these strategies can be valid in some contexts, they are often a form of avoidance. They are an attempt to find an easy way out of a hard problem.

The Power of Lead Bullets

The author argues that for core product or competitive deficits, there are no silver bullets. The only solution is lead bullets: the hard, grinding, unglamorous, head-on work required to fix the fundamental issue.

If your product is five times slower than the competition, the only solution is to do the engineering work to make it faster.
If you are consistently losing deals because of a product gap, the only solution is to build the features required to win.

This requires courage from the leader to:

Face the brutal facts: Acknowledge that there is no easy way out.
Reject the distractions: Say "no" to the tempting silver bullet ideas that the team will inevitably propose.
Focus the organization: Rally the entire team to do the difficult, necessary work to solve the core problem.

There comes a time in every company's life when it must fight for its life. In those moments, you cannot run or pivot. You must stand and fight with lead bullets. If your company isn't good enough to win that fight, you must ask if it deserves to exist at all.

Tags: #leadership #strategy #execution #focus #hard-things #startups #competition