A recommended cap of roughly two to three concurrent strategic focus areas, as opposed to ten, or seventy, simultaneous initiatives. The reasoning: doing two things in parallel does not run at the same speed as doing one thing twice — parallel bets compete for the same scarce leadership attention and execution capacity, so nominal parallelism produces real slowdown, not real throughput.
The construction-site analogy makes the mechanism concrete: building a house requires the foundation, then the walls, then the roof, in that order. You cannot usefully crowd the site with materials for a later, uncertain phase before the current phase is done — doing so only creates clutter and risk without accelerating anything. The lesson for strategy is the same: sequence bets according to their real dependencies, and resist stakeholder requests to start later-stage work before earlier, foundational work is finished.
This is the operational discipline behind Placing Bets (Strategy-as-Bets Framing) — a small number of bets is only meaningful if the org also enforces the WIP limit that keeps it small. It's also the mechanism that prevents a strategy from decaying into a Peanut Butter Strategy.