You're Not Growing Fast Because You're Making Decisions Slowly | Ep 859
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You're not growing as fast as you want because you're not making decisions as fast as you need to. I heard this really great bit by Elon and it moved me enough to try and look at my own decision making process and audit it. And there's this great quote by Lee Iacocca, which is the speed of the boss is the speed of the team. And I think a lot of that comes down to your ability to make decisions quickly.

And so right now, I mean, fundamentally, a lot of what we do in entrepreneurship and even leadership within businesses is we're tasked with making decisions. And it's one of these very amorphous topics that most people kind of like yawn at. But like fundamentally at its core, what business is this decision making? Right. You have to make lots of little decisions throughout the day with varying levels of impact.

And I think one of the big mistakes that I have made in my career that I, you know, try to remedy is making decisions too slowly or requiring, you know, too much data in order to make decisions. And the reality of it is that we often have to make decisions with incomplete data in kind of a world of changing variables and try and, you know, make our best shot. What I want to

recommend or at least kind of talk through today is a different way of seeing it that has like really shifted my process before I dive in think back to you know maybe your goals uh four quarters ago right so maybe you had some annual goals maybe you had some you know quarterly goals that you wanted to hit uh some monthly revenue numbers some sales numbers marketing numbers lead numbers Etc

Now, if you can think back to what you were thinking about then, you probably are like, oh my God, if I looked at those quarterly objectives, they seem so out of date now as they should, right? And likely a lot of variables have changed since you decided to make those goals. But what's interesting about it is that like we probably, and you, if you're like me, probably belabored a long time over those goals and that planning. But what's been really interesting is that like

The variables of the game change so rapidly that a lot of times, like super long-term planning, I've become less and less a fan of. And what's resulted is just more of an emphasis on decisions that I need to make today.

And I said at the very beginning that Elon had this really interesting frame, which is what I want to talk about, is when he was under the gun and it looked like Tesla could go bankrupt. And this was probably like 2022. And he had to get production to like 5,000 cars a week. And every single one of the engineers in his company said, there's no way we can get above 1,800. And they were at like less than that at the time when he made the prediction. And it was supposed to be like a quarter or two.

And it was an incredibly taxing time period in his life. And I think we can all kind of resonate with those kind of like gun against your head, like you have to figure it out. There's a story that Isaac Wolterson tells in the biography where Elon is on the floor and he says, listen, there are so many decisions that have to get made that I'm going to be making them on the spot and I'm going to get it right 80% of the time and I'm going to get it wrong 20% of the time. And then 20% of the time that I get it wrong, we can always fix it.

And I think, and Bezos talks about this too. And the reason I'm bringing them up is I consider them like, you know, the all time goats of entrepreneurship, independent of whatever your political beliefs are. They're fucking amazing entrepreneurs. In the interview that Bezos gave with Lex Friedman, he talks about decision-making a lot. And I bring this up because like, it's one of these topics, like I said, that no one really wants to talk about, but like the people who are at the very top talk almost exclusively about decision-making because obviously there's something important there is that they've made better decisions than other people have. And they've gotten disproportionate returns as a result.

And so Bezos talks a lot about the importance of making fast decisions. And so he basically determines, is this a one-way door or is this a revolving door? As in like, is this a decision that can be unmade or is it a decision that

Once we make it, we can't pass through it, pass back through, right? And what I've found is that the vast, vast, vast majority of decisions can be unmade. There's a cost associated with it, but we don't take into account the much larger cost, which is across an organization, the cost of indecision, the cost of inaction, the cost of waiting too long and delaying things. And so when you think about the speed of the boss, the speed of the team is like, how quickly can the boss make decisions? Imagine if

Imagine just like as a hypothetical extreme that every single person in the organization could pass every single decision by you. Right. And you could make them in an instant. Right. Well, that would be like you like the company would move at an absolutely breakneck speed because all decisions would get passed through. Now, mind you, you probably like, you know, blow your brains out. But like fundamentally, that's the idea.

And so then I thought to myself, okay, what can I do to increase decision-making? And I thought, well, what slows down decision-making? And so for me, the things that slow down decision-making is it honestly comes down to one thing, which is fear of making a mistake, right?

is that I'm afraid of, you know, looking dumb to the team and making a decision that, you know, people either obviously think is wrong or that turns out to be wrong. And then I look bad and I lose respect from the team and then maybe lose authority or gravitas or whatever. Right. I thought about this and I was like, how do I, how do I decrease that fear? How do I make me making decisions faster happen by decreasing the friction associated with it? And so

you know, by racking my brain here, the thing that I came up with is pretty straightforward is first off explaining the nature of the biggest cost of the businesses, me being indecisive, right? And also every leader in the business being indecisive. And as a result,

us slowing down everything. If you think about the gazillions of decisions, if every one of those decisions takes 20% or 50% longer, like every, cause a lot of, a lot of decisions happen in their contingency based decisions. Like we have to make this decision. Then once we make that decision, then there's other decisions that are contingent on that decision. And then there's decisions that are contingent on that decision. And so there's big chain of dominoes. We end up, you know, belaboring decisions for so long that like we almost wait for life to make the decision for us so that we don't have to have the fear of being wrong.

And so what I'm pushing myself to do is prefacing in meetings and in conversations and Slack messages and emails, hey, I might be wrong here, but we need to make this decision. And so this is my best bad idea. This is my best bad decision. Let's go forward with that. And if it's wrong, we can fix it later. And by doing it that way, and also Zuckerberg talked about, you know, I think it's like build, break stuff and do, I don't know, it's like,

move fast and break stuff was a core competency or core value of Facebook for a very long period of time. And they only edited it in the years of the 2020 years, we'll just put it that way. But the thing is, is I like to look at what got a company to where it's at

and move fast and break stuff was one of their competencies. And so you think about like the three, you know, three of the richest people in the world from an entrepreneur's perspective all talk about the speed of making decisions.

I guess my mental challenge to you today and to myself is, one, how can I normalize fast decision making within the company? Number two, how can I decrease the pain associated with making a bad decision for myself and the team, both by prefacing it and also, and this is the tougher one, not normalizing

aggressively punishing the people who make poor decisions. Now, if someone consistently makes bad decisions, then they just might be an idiot. In which case, you know, okay, maybe they shouldn't be on the team. We have to take into consideration kind of like someone's decision batting average. Right now, you know, in the baseball world, it's like if you hit 300, you're a great baseball player. I would say in the business world, if you're hitting 80%, you're probably a good decision maker. The other, you know, wrinkle to this, I said that's one and two. The third wrinkle here is

Sometimes there's just a lot of right decisions. There's even more wrong decisions than there are right decisions, but there's often multiple right decisions. In the government contracting world, which is the first place, that was my first workplace, believe it or not, was a defense contractor. We did space cyber and intelligence for the military. That was my first job out of college at a boutique consulting firm. There was this ism that they had in the company, which I've probably kept, which is they called them happy to glads.

And so happy to glads is like if you're writing a proposal and you're editing it, sometimes you get to the point where you're editing it to death, where you're just changing the word happy to be the word glad, which is like, OK, well, they're both probably fine. And neither of them will will increase or decrease the likelihood that we actually get this job. So we're just kind of like changing things for the sake of changing them. But either of them will work.

And so I just find that a lot of times the decisions that I'm choosing between, both of them will work. And maybe one could work slightly better than the other, but the delay that I have to make between either of those choices makes either choice significantly worse than the incremental benefit of picking the slightly better option.

And so by framing my decisions that way, which is basically speed of decision-making me being Nirvana, let's say that I've got, you know, decision A and decision B and decision B for the sake of our conversation is, is 10% better than decision A. Now, I don't know that at the time, but let's say it ends up being 10% better. Me being able to decide A is,

instantly versus B in a week makes A or B 50% or 100% or 200% better of a decision.

Because speed is still going to out-compete the incremental margin. And speed across hundreds of decisions is for sure going to beat out a 5% or 10% incremental margin. That thought process is what I'm trying to make as my North Star. Because fundamentally, a lot of my job is, at this point, I don't do a huge amount of doing. I do a lot of deciding. Making speed my priority has been really helpful. And so basically, if you're thinking about this as the decision-making matrix, like I

Up front is, is this irreversible or not? The likelihood that it's irreversible is low, which means it probably is reversible. If it is reversible, what are the options I have in front of me? Cool. Of the options that I have in front of me, will both of them probably get me there? Yes. If so, pick one. As simple as that sounds, that's been kind of the thinking process that I'm trying to employ more and more within the organization and also teach

across the organization within leaders because they're also, you know, we're making a decentralized decision-making process. At the end of the day, you cannot make every single decision. And so hopefully the decisions that are coming to you are at least worth your time, but the team has to be able to make decisions on your behalf and be, you know, relatively okay about it. I'm teaching this as a thought exercise to our team of like, I would rather you just make the decision

and teaching decisiveness as a core competency within the org. And so I know this is probably one of the shorter pods that I've had. I don't think it makes it any less important. I guess speed is the underlying point for this today. But as you approach your day today, maybe consider like if both of these will get us there and one of them might be better than the other, me choosing fastest can be better than both.

And maybe that gives you a little bit of permission to get the 80% right and forgiveness for yourself of getting the 20% wrong and letting your team know, I'm for sure going to get 20% wrong. And I'm going to just try and get them wrong on the ones that we can flip back fast. And so I want to hear no griping if we have to flip something back fast. And to the same degree, if you were making these decisions and you make a little whoopsie, I'm not going to get on your case about it because I want you to just be making more decisions quickly so that we can move faster as an org.

And so anyways, hope you're having an amazing day. Keep slaying and I'll catch you guys in the next one. Hey guys, real quick. Just want to say thank you for sharing the podcast. It continues to grow only because of y'all sharing it and tagging it and sending it to your employees and into your friends, putting your Slack messages. It's the only way podcasts really grow. And so I just want to say thank you guys. And if you do think of somebody who this would be helpful for, maybe your team, please send it to them. It would mean the world to me.