I was listening to a recent episode of How I Built This featuring Daniel Lubetzky, the founder of KIND Bars. (Worth your time.)

He was talking about product development and the discipline required to decide what moves forward and what gets left behind. His framework was simple and surprisingly clarifying.

If a new product fails, the decision is easy. You move on. If it is a hit, the decision is also easy. You scale it.

But what do you do when the product scores a six out of ten?

It does not fail. It does not embarrass the brand. It just does not clear the bar. And that, Lubetzky said, is the hardest call. Because something that scores a six takes up resources, attention, and shelf space that could be going to something that belongs at a ten.

His answer: You sunset it. Because the standard is not “acceptable.” It is excellent.

I have not been able to stop thinking about that in the context of independent schools.

It Does Not Have to Be a Failure to Be a Problem

A program launched five years ago with genuine enthusiasm. A faculty member who championed it. A handful of families who rely on it. Modest enrollment. Modest outcomes. No real complaints, but no real energy either.

It just exists.

These programs are not obvious problems. They are not budget emergencies. They are not PR risks. They are simply taking up space: a line item in the budget, a share of someone’s attention, a few hours a week from faculty who could be focused elsewhere.

And because they are not failures, they are rarely examined the way failures are.

Why the Six Is So Hard to Let Go

The reason schools hold onto sixes is not complacency. It is culture.

Independent schools are relationship-driven institutions. Someone built that program. Someone still believes in it. Sunsetting something that is not obviously broken can feel like a betrayal, especially in environments where people are deeply committed to the work and to each other.

There is also an accountability gap. If no one set clear success criteria at launch, there is no clean basis for the conversation. You cannot hold a program accountable to a bar that was never established. So instead of a principled decision, you get a slow drift, year after year, until the program is just part of the furniture.

The result is that the six does not get cut. It gets renewed by default.

But a Six Has Real Costs

Here is what that default renewal actually costs.

Budget. Most schools operate with limited discretionary resources. An underperforming program is spending dollars that could be allocated to a higher-return use. The budget line may look modest, but over five years, it adds up.

Faculty and staff time. Time is the most constrained resource a school has. Every hour a teacher or administrator spends running a six is an hour not spent on work that is creating real value. That cost never shows up on a balance sheet, but it is very real.

Leadership attention. This is the one that gets underestimated the most. Leaders have finite attention. When merely acceptable programs occupy it, it is not available for the work that actually moves the school forward. The cost of carrying a six is not just what it spends. It is what it crowds out.

Strategy Is Also About What You Stop

Leaders tend to think of strategy as a planning exercise. A process of identifying where you want to go and what you want to build. And it is that. But it is also something else.

Real strategy requires active subtraction.

Every school has a limited runway of resources, talent, and attention. When you add a new initiative without removing something else, you are not growing your capacity. You are diluting it. Over time, the accumulation of sixes creates drag, slowing everything down.

This comes up in almost every strategy engagement I do. Helping a leadership team identify what to pursue is the easier half of the work. The harder half is developing the discipline to stop doing things that are not working well enough. The planning is not the hard part. The choosing is.

The Missing Framework

The reason these conversations do not happen enough is not because leaders lack the will. It is because they often lack a shared framework for having them.

No criteria were set at launch. No agreed-upon definition of success. No timeline for evaluation. So the program keeps running because nobody wants to be the one to end something that is not obviously broken, and there is no agreed-upon basis for ending it, even if someone wanted to.

This is fixable. But it requires building the habit before the programs launch, not after.

Before you start something new, answer these questions:

• What does success look like at 12 months? At 24 months?

• What is the enrollment, revenue, or outcome threshold this program needs to hit to continue?

• Who owns the evaluation, and when does it happen?

• What would have to be true for us to sunset this?

Setting that bar at the beginning is not pessimism. It is discipline. And it makes the review conversation significantly less personal when the time comes.

Two Questions Worth Asking Right Now

If you are carrying programs you would honestly rate at a six, take them to your leadership team with two questions:

Is this meeting the standard we hold for everything else we do?

If we were starting this from scratch today, would we?

The first is about quality. The second is about intention. Together, they cut through inertia and history to get to the real question: Does this belong in our portfolio?

The answers might surprise you. Either way, they are worth having.

The Standard Is Excellence, Not Acceptability

Independent schools talk about excellence constantly. It is in the mission statement. It is in the head’s annual address. It is in the marketing materials.

But holding that standard requires being honest about what is not meeting it, and having the courage to act on that honestly.

A six does not embarrass you. But it does cost you. And over time, the accumulation of sixes is what keeps good schools from becoming great ones.

The discipline to sunset the six is not a failure of loyalty to the people who built it. It is a commitment to the standard you say you hold.

Peter Baron is the founder of MoonshotOS, a consulting practice that helps independent school leaders build business acumen, strategic clarity, and execution infrastructure.