When to Stop a Project: The Most Courageous Act of Leadership

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez is a leading expert in project management and strategy implementation, recognized by Thinkers50 with the prestigious award “Ideas into Practice.” He is the creator of concepts like The Project Economy and the Project Manifesto. He is author of Lead Successful Projects (2019, Penguin) The Project Revolution (2019, LID) and The Focused Organization (2012 Gower). He has been teaching project management for more than a decade to senior executives at Duke CE, Skolkovo, Solvay Business School, and Vlerick. Antonio has held executive PMO positions at PricewaterhouseCoopers, BNP Paribas, and GlaxoSmithKline. Former Chairman of the Project Management Institute, he is the co-founder of the Strategy Implementation Institute and the global movement Brightline.

  Leadership   Strategy  

Projects are like babies.

Every parent believes their child is the cutest, smartest, most promising little human on the planet.

It’s the same with projects.

Once launched, they’re hard to critique—and even harder to stop. The people who created them—sponsors, leaders, PMOs—become attached.

The deeper the investment, the harder it is to pull the plug.

But the most courageous leadership decision might not be to start a project—but to stop it.

In today’s transformation age, that decision has never been more important.

The True Cost of Not Stopping
In most organizations, starting a project is a celebration. It’s visible. It sends signals of ambition and innovation. It fills dashboards with activity. But there is rarely a clear process —or even cultural permission—to say: “This initiative no longer makes sense. Let’s end it.”

In a Harvard Business Review article I wrote, Your Company Needs to Focus on Fewer Projects — Here’s How, I highlighted a striking pattern across industries: Teams are juggling dozens of parallel initiatives, often with overlapping goals, unclear ownership, and fading business cases.

Everyone is “busy”—but very few are delivering meaningful value.

This phenomenon—what I often call project addiction—is something I…

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