Last time I laid out the Leverage Stack: the map for being deliberate rather than frantic about where and how you apply force. This is part two, and it goes after the single question the Stack exists to answer first – not which lever, but where do I place it? Where do I direct my efforts?

Because here's what I kept running into while researching this series. Almost every leader I work with is strong at pulling hard. Almost none of them stops to ask whether they're pulling in the right place. They mistake effort for direction. And the cost of that mistake is invisible, because the effort is real and the exhaustion is real – it just doesn't move anything.

A session last week made the principle concrete in a way I couldn't have scripted.

Recently, I was working with the management team of a German PE-backed company, with around €500 million in revenue, being readied for a sale in 2028. One of my one-on-one sessions was with the CFO.

The investor had brought him in for the upside: accelerating growth through M&A, getting the company exit-ready, starting to engage investors. I've known this executive for years. This was the kind of opportunity he'd been working toward for a decade.

But he'd been met with resistance almost everywhere he turned. He wanted to put real management reporting in place, and the people who'd owned the numbers for years had a reason every quarter why the rebuild had to wait. He'd touched how people were measured and paid, and as it often does, it landed badly. Each move took something away from someone who'd been there long before he arrived. And the owners had started to notice he was the one making everyone uncomfortable.

So he came to me with a question. After ten years of working toward exactly this, he could feel it slipping. Have I lost my focus? Should I drop all this org-development work, find a couple of M&A targets, and just start engaging investors?

He said it almost as a confession. And I told him I thought he had the diagnosis exactly backwards.

Before you can move, grow, or change a company, you have to see it for what it is: a system. People connected to people, roles, processes, resources, and the unwritten rules about how things actually happen. You don't issue commands into it. You intervene, and it reacts.

And here's the question almost nobody asks before they act: of all the places I could intervene, which one actually moves the most?

Think of any intervention as a lever, and a lever has three parts.

Leaders obsess over the first two. Push harder (hustle, burn more tokens). Buy a longer lever (raise more money, hire more people). Both feel like progress, and both scale in a straight line: twice the effort, at best twice the result. The third part is the only one that really moves the needle. Move the fulcrum, and the same push moves ten times the weight, or nothing at all.

This is what leverage actually is: the 80% of the outcome that comes from the right 20% of the work. And that 20% is a fulcrum placement, not an effort level.

Which is exactly what Donella Meadows established at MIT in the 1970s: in any system, where you intervene matters more than how hard you push. She ranked interventions from shallow to deep. At the shallow end, the things easy to reach and change: you raise a budget, reset a target. The number moves, the system absorbs it and carries on. At the deep end, the things almost nobody touches: the ones that decide how everything above them behaves. Change one and the structure rearranges, whether people wanted it to or not.

My client had spent six months pulling on the shallow ones.

He thought his job was the shallow work: find the targets, model the deals, get in front of investors. The visible work a CFO is hired for. And that work was real. But it wasn't his actual mandate. So I asked him the only question that mattered: 

Forget your title, why were you actually brought in? 

The answer came right away. Not "run finance." Make this company exit-ready. That is what he'll actually be judged on.

Naming it changes what everything else means. The reporting nobody will rebuild, the loose controls, the long-serving manager defending a model he won't touch: in isolation, each one looks like a distraction from the real work. Once the mandate is named, they invert. They aren't pulling him away from the job. They are the conditions that have to hold before the company can go to market at all.

This is what most focus advice gets wrong. It tells you to do fewer things. But his list wasn't too long. What was missing was the one sentence at the top that turns a scattered list into a sequence.

Look back at where he met resistance. The reporting, the controls, the people who'd been there for years – the pushback clustered exactly around the things he needed most. That's not coincidence. Shallow changes slide through; the deep ones push back, because they move something the structure rests on. The resistance was a map. He'd just been reading it as a warning.

Which points to the deepest place of all: the story the organization tells itself about why any of this is happening. As long as he's the only one carrying "we're selling," every bit of resistance lands on him personally, which is exactly what his feedback was measuring. Once that story is real and shared at the level that matters, the resistance has nowhere to stand. The most entrenched version of we've always done it this way meets a sentence it can't out-wait: it's happening, with or without you.

He'd been reaching for every tool except the one that would have made the others work.

Take one change you're trying to make right now. Not the whole transformation, one concrete thing: "get the leadership team to commit to the new strategy," "make forecasting reliable," "get product and sales to stop fighting."

Now lay out the points where you could intervene, from shallow to deep. A working version of Meadows' hierarchy, simplified:

Then two questions:

Yours,