Bangalore: With competing and ever-changing agendas, managing priorities is a critical skill for executives. Very often, starting work on a new project gets delayed, or even projects that have gone some way towards completing get the second preference, because we have competing priorities. Across industries, most of the executives believe that they are torn by too many conflicting priorities. They blame their companies for lack of "coherence", saying that their company's capabilities don't fully support their strategy. If a company has too many priorities and is not able to support and issue clear decisions, it is almost certainly missing out on profits, according to a recent executive survey. The survey of over 1,800 executives conducted by Booz & Company says that companies consider deciding on priorities as a vital issue. 64 percent of the survey respondents said that their company has too many conflicting priorities, which makes them frustrated. This leads to delay in starting on all of them. As a result, things get stuck and they end up doing even less. Apart from this, companies seem to be suffering from what you might call corporate attention deficit disorder, says the survey of global executives, the majority of whom griped of employers with too many conflicting priorities and not enough focus. According to them, being cluttered with many conflicting priorities can make decision-making poor. The majority of respondents said that their companies lack "coherence", and struggle with establishing a strategy that is clear and that differentiates the business. 52 percent of the executives surveyed, do not feel their company's strategy will lead to success. When it comes to making above-industry-average revenue growth, the firms with more than 10 priorities perform almost as poorly as companies with no priorities at all. For example, while 44 percent of firms with one to three priorities are raking in more than average revenues, only 28 percent of companies with more than 10 firm-wide initiatives are doing so. Managing multiple conflicting priorities within the enterprise can be a daunting task. It's stressful and many executives say that they would gladly scale back to only one or two priorities vs. managing multiple ones. The reason is simple. Pulling in too many directions can lead to a mess resulting in poor decisions in terms of the company plans. Companies succeed when they have a well-defined set of differentiated capabilities that connect to their chosen way of competing and their portfolio of products and services. Unfortunately, few companies have these elements in what we would describe as a "coherent" strategy.