Arguing Agile

AA221 - Steve Jobs' Radical Decision-Making: Why Consensus Beats Disagree & Commit

• Brian Orlando • Season 1 • Episode 221

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Steve Jobs once said he'd rather fire someone than force them to buy into a decision they disagreed with. This flies in the face of popular leadership advice like Amazon's "disagree and commit" philosophy. In this episode, we dive deep into Jobs' consensus-driven approach at NeXT and explore why expert-driven decision making might be superior to top-down mandates.

We examine how Jobs' 8-person policy team made only 25 major decisions per year, the importance of psychological safety in decision-making, and why paying people to tell you what to do (rather than just do what you say) creates better outcomes. Other topics include...

  • Consensus vs. "disagree and commit" leadership styles
  • Expert-driven decision making vs. ivory tower decisions 
  • Building psychological safety for real alignment
  • Scaling decision frameworks in growing organizations
  • When to fire vs. when to coach through disagreement

Perfect for product managers, agile coaches, and leaders looking to build more effective decision-making processes.

#DecisionMaking #Leadership #ProductManagement

LINKS
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Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/362QvYORmtZRKAeTAE57v3
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agile-podcast/id1568557596
Website: http://arguingagile.com

REFERENCES

  • Source Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_W6dLP09MQ
  • Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon, by Colin Bryar & Bill Carr, 2021
  • Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders, by L. David Marquet, 2013
  • AA208 - Jamie Dimon's Rant: Leadership Lessons on Trust and Effectiveness
  • AA201 - Mastering Stakeholder Communication & Management

INTRO MUSIC
Toronto Is My Beat
By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)
CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

Steve Jobs once said he'd rather fire someone than ask them to buy into a decision that they disagreed with. Most leadership advice, and I'm talking specifically about the working backwards, Amazon. Which we, Jeffrey, be, Jeffrey Bezos has been on other videos that we showed on the podcast. Where he talks about disagree and commit so somewhere in the podcast, fear of our Back catalog, we have run up against Jeffrey Bezos and his disagreeing commit, just say your Peace kid, and then shut up and do what I say. Like that's, I'm pretty sure that's the way we talked about it being interpreted. Yeah. And Steve Jobs is saying we don't do things that way. So that's, that, that and some other Steve Jobs isms is the podcast today. This, yeah. So this the Steve Jobs video goes back away. Yeah. Well, some people, the only reason, like the, the reason to spend a little more time upfront talking about it is if you bring up consensus driven decision making where we all have to agree to move forward, boy, you get a lot of pushback, a lot. It's almost as if people don't like being told they have to work things out right. Yeah. We'll deep dive into that today. It's almost as like people don't have the skill to play nice with the other children. Well, that's not what we got taught in kindergarten, so that's what we do in corporate kindergarten. for this episode we're gonna watch a video where Steve Jobs is talking about. A younger Steve Jobs working at Next, and he's talking about the way that they make decisions and run the company. So let's kick over to the video. what we're gonna do is we're gonna watch the whole thing, and then we're gonna talk about it at the Follow Up podcast. It's only about three minutes. It's a short one. I think it's worth watching, all right, here we go. let's play it. Ready? Let's go management. What's our management style? How do we resolve conflict? I've never believed in the theory that if we're on the same management team and a decision has to be made, and I decide in a way that you don't like, and I say, come on, buy into the decision. You know, buy into it. We're all on the same team. You don't agree, but buy into it. Let's go make it happen. Because what happens is sooner or later you're paying somebody to do what they think is right, but then you're trying to get'em to do what they think isn't right and it it, and sooner or later it outs and, and you, you end up having that conflict. So I've always felt that the best way is to get everybody in a room and talk it through until you agree. Now, that's not everybody in the company but that's. Everybody that's really involved in that decision that needs to, to execute it. So that's how we try to run next. The way we run next is we have a team at the top, we call the policy team. There's eight people. Mike is on it. I'm on it. We have six other people on it. And the key, we have two things we try to do. One is we try to differentiate between the really important decisions and the ones that we don't have to make and the really important ones, we work on it till we all agree because we're paying people to tell us what to do. In other words, I don't view that we pay people to do things That's easy to find people to do things. What's harder is to find people to tell you what should be done, right? That's what we look for. So we pay people a lot of money and we expect them to tell us what to do. And so when you, when that's your attitude, you shouldn't run off and do things if people don't all feel good about them. And the, the key to making that work is to realize there's not that many things that any one team really has to decide. And we, we might have 25 really important things we have to decide on a year, not a lot. So that's, that's how we try to run it. Sometimes it works and sometimes we're still working on it. I can't think of once, maybe there's once or twice, but I can't even recall a time when I've said , I'm the CEO and we're doing it this way. I can recall a time when I've said, we don't see eye to eye and you're off the team. You know, I've had to say that once or twice over a prolonged period of time when a person has not wanted to go in the same direction we've wanted to go in as a team. It's my job every once in a while to say, Hey, you want to go this way? We want to go this way. It's not working. but when people are on the team, then we work it out. Alright, so we just watched the whole video. The very first part of the video was him saying, Hey, like the common management practice of asking people to buy into a decision. Like get on board with this decision. I would say asking people is like, that's strongly worded, I mean demanding that people, telling people Yeah. Leading people through your point of view. Sure. You asked five people, you're gonna get seven dissenting opinions probably. Yeah. Yeah. Which is not convergence that you're looking for. This is a great conversation.'cause the first thing that I'll point out is in large organizations. When you're doing this browbeat stuff as an executive large organizations where like the directors of the the managers have like budgets and teams of their own, basically. They can make or break your decision very easily to be honest. all they have to do is sabotage or just not do whatever it is you're asking 'cause they don't agree with it. Anyone who's worked in a million large companies probably come across this, whether you recognize it or not, I don't know how well I'm gonna argue against this because like the, his, his main claim is the asking people to buy into a decision doesn't work. You need to stay in a room. Until consensus is built and you have a unanimous decision that this is gonna be the thing going forward. Yeah. That's the exit criteria from that but oftentimes what happens is HIPPOs prevail. Sure, sure, sure, sure. But this is, again, this is like a management culture that he's detailing where this comes from the top. Yeah. Which is like the all, all agreements, this is like a working agreement from the CEO level all the way down. All agreements have to be unanimous in all teams done. You're not gonna get much done. I couldn't even imagine. Yeah. A modern company, even a small company, I couldn't even, I could not even imagine the boldness of even stating that out loud we're just gonna make a unanimous decision. It's unanimous. As long as we all do, as I say. Yeah. Well, what you'll get is most people will just like, well, I just agreed to get outta the room. I just said yes to get outta the room. But I, I do have to think if this really is part of your culture, you're not gonna let people get away with that, that that's a cop out. I just said yes, but like, I'm not really gonna put in my best effort, that kind of thing. Or people will unknowingly or knowingly sabotage that decision, right? Because they've had no buy into it. They have no sense of ownership into it. Well, this is the culture of Yes. Men. Yes, it is indeed. yes. People, I guess if we're being politically correct, look at medium to large companies. You see a lot of this and then this is the meeting after the meeting where people talk about stuff and go, what was all that about? Right? Well, why didn't anybody say anything in the meeting? Oh, man. Typically at the town halls, these decisions aren't. Discuss so much as dictated, right, right. This is what we're doing. Yeah. Well, I mean that that makes total sense to me. I mean, yeah, it does. If you're going back to our, arguing Agile 2 0 1, mastering Stakeholder Communication and Management, where we talk about this, the power influence grid. And in that podcast, we were very tactical where each section of the grid has its own, methods of communication. So if you're messaging to the low interest, low power crowd, that's one way, one blast communication emails one mass, slack message, update, whatever you don't expect responses back. It's informing as opposed to like, Hey, at this town hall I'm asking for opinions on this thing. How should I make the, that's not that type of communication that's happening. No, it's, it's absolutely not often that kind of communication in that lower quadrant right, of the two by two comes from a mailbox and it just says this is not a monitored mailbox. Do not respond. It's like you're just being one way communicated to Right. Which is also my email signature. This is not a monitored mailbox. Don't, don't respond ever ever to anything on the internet. Oh, sorry. The strongest pushback that I can offer you if, if I'm gonna offer you any pushback at all, the strongest one is the consensus seeking that you're doing here. Like, how much time are you gonna spend on that? This is, this is analysis paralysis. O you're gonna spend hours and hours and hours in these meetings trying to drive to get to a consensus. You know what isn't my model where I'm Jamie Diamond and I just decide like everyone needs to return to office? Because I said so, because I woke up angry that day and I just decided, I was, I came into the office on Sunday, there was nobody there. I got real angry and you know, I'm the CEO so I can do that. Yeah. If you're looking for opinions and consensus. You know, you take the number of people you have and Right. And so it's basically, you have so many vectors now. Yeah. You have end to the power end basically and you can't, you don't have the, the, the bandwidth to kind of entertain that this is not the right type of communication. I mean Right. I feel like the arguing point of like analysis paralysis I would say first of all, like Steve Jobs is pointing out, my policy team is like eight people. And I would, I don't know exactly 'cause I did zero research other than watching this simple YouTube video. But I would imagine that his policy team was like more senior people in the organization, people that have been through a lot of different orgs and organizational structures, and have seen a thing or two. That's where I'm trying to go with that, is like, these people can't all be your executive Yes. Men. You know, you're the ceo, and these are all your direct reports. And they they say the wrong thing and they're out type of like, I think this policy's great. What do y'all think? And everyone just like nods their heads and doesn't say anything, right. That that can't be the group. It needs to be like a couple people from around the business that are good at their thing and that you respect them and potentially they don't report to you. I think you do need the cross checks and balances from, from people that can see the blind spots at least. Right. So I agree. if you're looking at eight people and. What's consensus out of eight people? Five. Yeah so that's a different story. Versus somebody who's got 40, 50 people like the Jensen Huwang of the world. Right, I don't think Steve Jobs was the kind of person who would say we don't have consensus, so we're gonna wait. Also like every decision doesn't have to involve everyone. There's a Absolutely. But also you, you just touched off a one that I wanna deal with before we flip over to like every decision. Doesn't need to follow, he has a, basically a corporate, like a, a executive level steering committee basically is what he has with his policy team. That's what he's saying. It's some sort of like cross-functional team Yeah. That just looks at policy issues and he is like, oh, temporary team. They're not, they're not like, they don't work every single day on that thing I was talking about the analysis paralysis thing about like moving slow with decisions. And if you have to take your decisions to this team, part of the pushback again, he said like, we don't really take that many decisions to this team to be honest. At 25 decisions, he's basically saying this team really only is asked to decide one thing every other week. Yeah., And they're probably big should we move into this market? Should we invest X money? Should we they're probably big things that require significant investment. They're probably not like should we add a toggle here or something nonsense yeah. But the decisions require speed and that's an argument against here. It's like, well, how long do we have to wait until we go in front of this policy team? Right. That's a fair argument because when it's decisions at that level as opposed to the lower levels the longer you take the riskier it is and that's not dependent on the outcome of your decision. It's just riskier because the market moves on. The competition goes faster than you. Right? So those opportunities could disappear in front of you if you take too long. I think that cadence for what it's worth, just that one data point that we have a decision every other week. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's doable with this small team of people, right? But if you're, if you've got four or five times the number of people that even that becomes challenging, So before your next major decision, you ask yourself, am I seeking input to make a better decision? Or am I seeking buy-in to make execution easier? What does that mean? Execution? So seeing the decision through to completion, but those are separate. Like those are completely disjointed questions in my mind. Is my, my I'm looking at this from a product management lens of like, I'm seeking input to make a better decision with regard to like which feature to build, how deep to go with it, that kind of stuff. Whereas like once I decide that we're gonna work on the feature, that's a once we're, once I decide we're gonna execute, that's a different set of circumstances to me. I think at this point it's just really juxtaposing the idea that you seek consensus and then move forward, or you make a decision and you get to execution quicker. The thing that's not really spelled out super well in this section is, you build consensus so that all the evidence and all the conflict gets drawn out of people and put on the table. You build consensus so you can get clarity among a group of people that like clarity may not be apparent. That's the whole point of going through the exercise. People are in the dark and they just have to like, be okay being in the dark. Be like, you know what? I don't know what's going on, but like that guy says that that's the way to go and he's a CEO and it's not gonna affect me if it's bad on him. You know, it's bad on the company, which is like that, that that's a very, like the hole is in your side of the boat kind of absolute. Correct. And that's the one that's dangerous because you could have blind spots. Everybody does. And no one's challenging those. Well, let's move on to number four. He says they have a policy team at the top. He says there's eight people. Mike's on it. Just to let you know, Mike's on it. So everything's good. Mike's got this. he says they try to differentiate between the really important decisions and the decisions that they don't need to make people are looking for him to be the arbiter right. And he's saying, no, you guys figure it out. which could be, I mean, I could come to you in like a mentor capacity of like, Hey, I really need your help, or how would you go with this? Right. And then if you're a, this is like a mentor versus coach thing. Like the mentor would just tell you which way to go. Or the coach would just ask you like, Ooh, which way do you think you should go? You know? No, you're right. And, and so I think in this particular topic decisions that are at this high level jobs recognize that it's better if eight people together make those decisions. And by virtue of deferring everything else, right? That's how they arrive at the 25 a year. Mm-hmm. So those are the ones that really matter, who you need consensus, everything else that it's low, it's lower in priorities and whatever else, impact and so forth. The power of eight people's thinking behind the decision. Well, I mean, it's more than just consensus building though. It's, it's like making sure people see what others don't see right. Each other and coming up with the best possible decision as a group. Right. Also not explicitly spelled out here is when he kicks decisions back down to say like, look, I don't need to decide this. I don't know why you are asking my opinion you figure it out and you bring me the outcome I don't see anybody talking about that. It's like, Hey, why are you being asked to make this decision? When have you kicked a decision back to be like, I don't see why this is even brought in front. Because I would imagine under the policy team, you have everything you need to resolve it on your own. Because I would imagine under the policy team, if that policy team is eight people, let's pretend there's like eight teams of eight under, like each of those team members repping to the policy team has their own team of eight under them. Do those circles make their own decisions of what to do? They probably do, and then I would hope they use a similar decision process as the parent group.'cause otherwise, oh my goodness. Like what, what are we doing? Where every, every group makes its own decisions with different ways. And Yeah, it'd be chaos. Well, it, it would be chaos. But also like, let's think about what I just said for a second. Most organizations are exactly like I just described as like random decision making processes. That's right. I said processes.'cause I like saying it that way. And like, random, random, like fiefdoms around the business where like some groups do it by consensus. Some groups have a little dictator. Yeah. No, you're right. I, the larger the organization, the more variation you're gonna get in this, right? Yeah. But you'd like to think that if senior leadership are following this model, that other people would emulate that. Right. You would like to think that in practice, you and I both have seen very different outcomes out there. I like the success breed success model. I do like that. In theory, the problem is when people start getting busy And get stressed. Like contract renewals and customer negotiations are up in the air. Like everyone gets stressed and they all revert to all their worst practices. And it's the excuses that make me smile, oh, we're different than that group. We're nuanced We can't learn anything from them. Like focusing on understanding the other folks' perspectives when you're trying to build consensus like empathy for other people. Obviously, we can't get anywhere with that skill if you're practicing it in your own teams. Doesn't that make you better with customers? Like I would think practice makes perfect. I would think that a lot of people would be on board with that. Yeah. When looked at from that lens of, listen, I'm not making this decision for you. I suspect I know what the right decision is, but in lieu of like leading you short cutting this process, I want you to go back to your team and figure out what you need to ask to get the right answer. And then bring your consensus driven decision that you all agree on. Back to me and tell me what it's, yeah. And I think there's a little bit where people will come back and say, well, we have these three options, right? And we don't know which way to go. You'll be the arbiter, right? And a savvy leader would say, well, have you. Done the analysis, pros and cons for each one, show me the data and then push it back and say, what would you do if you were in my seat? Right other leaders would simply say, well you've all failed. Like I'm, I am, I'm just listening to what you're saying and I'm thinking to myself, Om, that's hard I have to that's, that's hard. Like I gotta get diverse perspectives. Yeah. I gotta gather data, I gotta go potentially do surveys. Hopefully there's somewhat educated guesses, but yeah, you're right. Absolutely. That this doesn't happen to the degree it needs to. Right. The diligence on this, and the funny thing is if we take all of this outta the equation and we just go back to like, if you build the muscle that it takes to actually discover things and make decisions via consensus. Like he's describing in this segment. But that that's a muscle that you're building and the stronger you get at it with your team in place, again, assuming the team doesn't change every, like his team of eight I'm assuming doesn't change every oh, I'm shuffle people out on the team every week or whatever, or every month or whatever. Yeah. I'm assuming they stay generally the same for a long period of time. You're building a muscle with the team where they can make decisions and they go through the normal process. And part of the reason might be that the, the lower you go in the organization, the pyramid, the more churn you're probably gonna get. It's just a volume thing. As opposed to less churn. And those people in turn acting as leaders and basically just instilling that model in their subordinates, which hopefully will do the same to their subordinate. Yeah. So if you have a lot of churn, that's very hard to do. The more you do this and drive towards consensus, the more you build a conflict resolution skill among this team. And again, if the rest of your teams are mirroring this style of consensus driving decisions the rest of your teams will work through this conflict resolution skill in their own teams. So like the whole org together advances their conflict resolution skill when it comes to making decisions. And again, like this is all stuff that, like the more, the deeper we get into this podcast the more I'm like, man, nobody's doing this it's like most modern businesses, like they get a little stressed and then the executives or whoever just start making like cowboy decisions shooting from the head. And all this stuff goes out the window of like, well, now we're not learning anything. We're just well, I'll just get outta my way. I'll just do it for you. With whatever information they're equipped to make that decision with, which is usually inadequate in some way, shape, or form, right? Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I mean, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the worst case of that is the group think that pressures om, we're gonna invite you to the congratulations, om you are, you're not invited to the policy team. You've made it to the top. You're talking to Steve Jobs, we're gonna, but now the whole meeting is just you're allowed to disagree with anything, but the minute you do, we're gonna beat you down. You know, and yeah, yeah. We gang up on you. In some way, shape, or form. I remember when I used to hire testers, when I was a QA manager, I would have to consider this as like, can I put the tester in? And they're sitting in an architectural review and will they challenge the developers to say, well, if we go with that architecture and we make these shortcuts like, is it gonna cause us problems? Are we gonna be on calls late at night? You know, rebooting the system or whatever, because we made these architectural shortcuts. And to even ask, even if they didn't know what they were talking about, to, to just ask the question.'cause they're afraid of getting yelled at basically. Or maybe not even getting yelled at, but being like, not being taken seriously, I guess is the the, the version of this. And like double, triple down if they were women that I was hiring to put on that team of all men. Now, now, now there's a whole nother side of it, yeah, I agree with that. And also just to add to that, there's also this, this kind of offshore cultural side of it as well. That's true yeah. So people don't tend to speak up. Yeah. The power dynamic, I mean the, the, that stuff boy, that can really torpedo all this, I mean, you really need a firm hand at the helm to move this kind of culture forward. And I don't know. I mean the, the, the takeaway in this section of the, the work it out mandate. Basically of like, listen, most decisions, you need to work it out and you only can bring it up to us when it is so critical that you need the policy team, the top level team, to make the decision. And even when the top level team is making the decision, I mean, it is expected that you're going to provide the top level team with all the evidence anyway. So it's not like you're shortcutting anything passing off the decision. You're still going through all the research and everything, and then you're handing it over to say, Hey, here's what I suggest. Please bless it. And now the team takes it from there because it's a much larger further broader in scope than anything else. Yeah, I think the power dynamic that you refer to also plays into it, right? It's at a certain level you're not allowed to make those decisions, but your input might be sought. You're afraid to speak your mind. Because you think you'll get ridiculed or just basically run over. Yeah. So here you could beg the question. You could say, if we make this decision, this could happen. But on the other hand, if we make this decision that requires you to have done your homework, I wonder if you could bound your decisions by the like if we're gonna like I already invoked Jeffrey Bezos on the podcast, so if we're gonna invoke Jeffrey Bezos again he has the one way versus two a door decisions like you, well, you can just back out. So like, the worst that you spent is like a sprint exploring a thing, and then you throw that work away and you go back to what you were doing and like nobody really cares. Yeah. Like you're the only ones that knew that like, oh, we really wanted this thing to work and it didn't work. Yeah. But nobody else cares, really. I mean, so like, maybe that's a way to look at this too, is like if it's a one way decision, one one way door decision. Yeah maybe that's your indicator that it's something that you want to hand off to this other team. I don't know I have a tough time with this category 'cause as a product manager, there are very few decisions I hand off. I like, maybe I'm a different product manager than most other product managers that most people are used to working with, where they're like, just like feature factory people or whatever, and they just like, you just manage the Jira backlog kid. Kid. And like get outta my office. But my vision and goals for the product in the organization are so strong that, that's what I'm checking in with leadership on a regular basis is this the way that you wanna go with the business? Because I really see a path here. And then they, guide me and we change goals and positioning based on where leadership wants to go with the whole business, which is a whole different podcast. Yeah. I mean, in that sort of scenario in product management, as long as your decisions are grounded in data and evidence, you are on a safe path, right? I mean, yes, somebody could veto it, but they'd have to have some reasoning behind it.'cause you are bringing in the evidence. Right? Right. And proposing something that's where I was going. You could go in a situation where you feel like you cannot say, this is the decision we're going with going with multiple options, but for each option have your data points lined up. And say if we do this, this would happen. On the other hand, if we do this, this could happen. And then let someone make the call. If you are really not willing to do that or are unable to do it in your situation, maybe. If unwilling or unable to do it, because why? That would be my question because the organization is designed in a way where you don't have that call. It's gotta go to other people. In that case, again, we go back to the episode where you're not the real product manager now, right? Often that is the culture, Where you are the person making the decision, but somebody has to endorse it and now it's their decision. You know, this is where there's this blame culture in place. These are games though, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. These are games, credit taking and all that sort of thing happens, right? Yeah. But you could still have these tactics that you could you could use. Yeah. At the end of the day, if you're in that sort of environment though, I will say what we always say on the podcast. Keep the resume updated. Okay, so the next section he says he talks about paying people to tell us what to do versus like having a committee at the top that just tell, sorry. Having people at the top that just tell everybody what to do. This is sort of like flipping the organization where the, the organization becomes a pyramid. Like the, the, not, not a pyramid scheme, that's a different podcast, but like the organization is a pyramid where all the important people sit on top, but it's like flipping the pyramid over. We're like. All the people that work are like the biggest portion. And then you only have to go in reverse when you wanna stand on your head. I don't know what kind of analogy. I think this is where David L. David Marcus says, take. So in that typical organization, you're taking information to authority. Right. Whereas his saying, you should take authority to information. Right, right. Yeah. That's what you're talking about. Steve Jobs in the video we just watched, he says, we hire smart people. And that means that we're paying them a lot of money to tell us what we should be doing because it would make no sense to get top talent. And pay them top dollar and then tell them what to do all day. Because they're supposed to be the smartest people and you know, he's going out and getting the smartest people in Silicon Valley. and so he's basically trying to fundamentally change this traditional power dynamic in corporate America. And I will argue, I don't know how successful the whole world has been since he had, I mean, NXT was like, or not NXT, that's the wrestling. The next was like a million years ago. It was like 87 dog years ago in Silicon Valley terminology but he has, he has two main categories, like ex expert driven decision making, which I feel like there there's been a lot of pushback in the world against like the experts oh, the experts don't know what they're talking about. I don't know how deep we wanna get into that one, but like. There, there's for and against when it comes to expert driven decision making. And oh boy can I talk about this one all day? So the, the subject matter experts, they have better information than executives. I would say like, not, not, it's not nine times outta 10. It's 10 times outta 10. Absolutely. The executives are up typically, quote unquote in their ivory towers. Yeah. They're not at the coalface so these people have the information, they know the dynamics that are going on. Why shouldn't they be the ones to make the decisions? Well, I'll give you the pushback right away, which is well, they shouldn't be the ones that make the decisions because they don't have broader business context. If the decisions are all being made in the ivory tower and pushed down, my argument to that would be. Well, how much context can you have from the ivory tower without ever walking the gemba? I almost want to start casting stones and say like, you can't, you can't do both. But like, you can do both. You can have your subject matter experts sit and make the decisions and your ivory tower folks don't need to make these high level decisions. It's just this weird thing over time where like, the people in the ivory tower, they get this detachment from reality. And they think, they're like, well, I'm here in the ivory tower and because I'm here in the ivory tower. I'm supposed to make the call. I'm better at everyone at making decisions because I'm in the ivory tower. Yeah. they start believing, self-fulfilling props. They start believing this. You know, which I will tell you is on our podcast agenda for a whole separate podcast of like, people they made one good decision in their life, and now they start believing that they only make good decisions. It's like, if I went into a casino and I won at the roulette wheel one time, and I just started saying like, I never lose that gambling. I. Can always win. You should listen to all the gambling advice I will ever give you. Always gamble on double zero. You should buy my books. Buy my books. These people up there in the ivory tower are double zero. I so far removed. Is that even on the roulette wheel? Double zero. Sure. No, there is a double zero and a double zero. Don't ask me how I know that. We may have gambling problems with the podcast. Send help. These people who are making the decisions in their insulated ivory towers? They're so far removed from the ground level realities when they make decisions that work, of course they'll claim all the credit, but when they make decisions that don't work, they will ascribe all the blame to those at the ground level. And that's basically how they flourish that's a sad reality, but that's what you see all the time out there. the only thing to point out here, and rightfully so, I think it's a fair thing to point out, is your product, your subject matter expert informed product decisions may be divorced from strategy or the best financial decision or things like that. You know it may not work for the business because you haven't necessarily tested business viability, right. Is like, Hey, this is the best thing. But yeah will people buy it? I think about this all the time for media products right now you don't want to be in the newspaper business right now. It's just a bad business right now. I mean, I'm not saying you can't succeed. There are successful journalists and stuff, but that's tough. Business to be in. Yeah, absolutely agree. I mean, the, it's, I mean, we could, we could go all day on this. So I have a publishing systems background, Yeah yeah. I can tell you the, the newspaper industry or the printing press industry, really, it's, it's magazines, books, newspapers. They kind of didn't see the writing on the wall that the newer generation prefer to consume information in different ways. The print media is not it. I mean, we, I remember well in the old days with newspapers being that thick on the weekend full of job ads, right? Mm-hmm. And now they're a very slim form of their former self. Mm-hmm. So yeah. So coming back to the this against, on the expertise driven decision making, we're kind of taking different points here. But strategic, tactical, or what's the third one? Financial, those kinds of decisions. They, it's not a black and white that these should be. Decisions made by those that are up there in leadership or those that are in the middle tier, those that are lower down. I think it's a case of let people have the empowerment they need to make the decision and then trust them mm-hmm. Will they get it right every time? No, but then neither would you. If you're one of those execs. See, that's a lot of work Om and I don't wanna do that. I would just wanna make all the decisions, like what you're outlining. just think about, I mean, honestly, I'm just trying to think about how I've never seen them outline a good strategy for how the business can divide these. Decisions that need to be like, okay, this is a team level decision, this is an executive level even the Steve Jobs thing that he just talked about. He's like, well, I got the policy team and then I got everybody else. So he just broke it up in the simplest terms, right? and he's like, well, everybody else can make these decisions in the business, and it just happens. But only the most important decisions for the whole business get made by the policy team. I'm assuming that the policy team is making like important strategic decisions, business partnership decisions, that kind of stuff well, we're gonna partner with this other company and let them do something for us, or whatever major investments of capital type of decisions. Right. The most impactful type. So there's like, there's some kind of framework in place at the company that says, you could go into the CEO's office, draw two big concentric circles on the wall, and on the left it'll be like policy team on the right. It's like everybody else. And the everybody else category is basically saying the CEO doesn't get involved in these decisions. And then you'd start writing inside the circles, the types of decisions investment. Every company I've ever been with, they have like the big thick HR guide that you just like sign when you start with a company and you don't read the whole thing. And then in, in the circle on the left where you're like, things that have to go through this strategy team, which again, is not just a CEO making decisions, it's a team. That's like chaired by the CEO or moderated by the CEO or facilitated by the CEO right. What are the types of decisions big partnership deals with other companies? Expenditures over X amount of dollars reorgs that are at the director level if you're a CEO, that's like, I want input on these things. And then everything else you don't need to spell everything else out. You just say anything that's not in circle number one. Don't spell it out. Just, and then if something pops up and is like, oh crap, I didn't think about this and I really should have had, then add it to the circle. Edit in. So I think it's a very simple model in terms, you described it, right? Even if you had more than two circles, it doesn't matter. It's a simple concept. Fundamentally, what lies at the bottom of all of that though, for this to work is trust and empowerment. Without that, none of these models work. If you're the type of CEO that has to have their hand in everything, at least I need to know why do you need to know what would happen if you didn't know that that's a low level decision. Yeah so just let them do it. Well, I mean, you're running, you're running into, you're running all over our different podcast agendas for different podcasts.'cause again, like I, I I understand what you're saying, but in reality, I've been with CEOs at growing companies that just freak out when you say like, you don't need to know that. Fear of the unknown. I don't know. They do, they do freak out. Well, I, I ran the company when the company was 20. I was, I was when I was on contract doing product management I was the first product manager. And I was coupled with the CI worked directly for the ceo, EOI mean, there were directors and stuff I could have worked for. Yeah. And they weren't quite sure if the role was like, permanent for them. So they got me on contract and they weren't sure where they wanna park the role under operations, under the CEO, under CTO. They didn't know, so they just parked me as a C-level employee advisor, maybe. Yeah. Advisor. Yeah. That kind of thing. And the CEO. Was involved in every decision. And I mean, every decision right down to like customer calls, customer support rep picked up the phone, something happened or whatever. And then like the COO, who's in charge of like customer support and that whole department or whatever would talk about it at the staff meeting. And then we'd be talking about a specific customer call or something like that. And, and because a customer wants something outta the call or whatever, now the CEO's involved. That now the CEO's involved in like ui ux design and like database architecture and stuff like that, but we put our empathy hat on because at one point it was the CEO and like an offshore development team that he was funding out of his pocket. And like one or two. Customer sales folks and that, and that was it. So he was used to being in every decision and he just didn't know how to transition to a world where he wasn't needed. it's almost like I hear people that retire and they feel like I lost my purpose in life because I don't have to work every day. Yeah. You know, it, it's, it's that type of thing. And that was, that was a that was a eye-opening in my career because it was about learning to let go of stuff that, number one, you really have no control in anymore, right? I mean, you're the CEO you can come in and muck around and things and make a big mess, but like, are you really helping resolve things? Really, if you think about it, are you really helping resolve things? You're not. I think that's a very common phenomenon with organizations that are growing, right? It was one thing when the CEO or typically entrepreneur, founder they started the company. It was small enough and now you're growing and you have to have mid-level managers that you have to empower and trust. Yeah. And let go of those things. Executive postpartum depression is a real thing. Okay? It's like they, they gotta let go. They gotta let go. My God, I had this, now I don't have it anymore. The expert driven decision making is what we're talking about. Yeah. And a solid four in this category is if the decisions stay at the level where the experts are, which basically is me saying the decisions stay at the team level, they stay with the people that are carrying out the work who theoretically should be the subject matter experts about the work. because that team has an error of psychological safety, they're gonna challenge bad ideas, be looking for evidence. And they're gonna be way ahead of all these expensive failures that happen. Because like somebody just came up with a shower thought and decided like, you know what, just build this. I don't care what you think about it. Just don't, don't ask questions. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the expertise that we speak of here it's like what level is that the CEO should have expertise at their level and should be focused on what they should be doing, strategy, et cetera, and not all of this lower level work. Right. But it is difficult for people to let go in, in organizations that are growing. There is a takeaway here. I like a lot of people might not like this, so it's, it's in the whole like, well, we, we hire people and then we tell them what to do. Which is like, not, not the way you wanna do it. Yeah. We're in a planning session, like a sprint planning or something like that, or we're picking up work. And the point of the conversation is what should we do? And you pivot into why should we do that? Because what should we do next is a completely different conversation than why are we doing this? Exactly. I definitely do coach the product managers and product owners to bring into the team the what, but also the why. Because given the why, they can challenge the what. And maybe, if not challenge at least come up with more innovative ways to meet the actual need Because these are smart people. Let them figure it out. But yeah, definitely do that. Don't just dictate to them what needs to be built.'cause you've already got so much built in terms of assumptions into it I already know what to build, so just go build it. Yeah. And then he said that, and the, that team, the policy team, the team at the top right, they probably only make 25 decisions, truly important decisions per year. So again, there, there's a indicator there that most organizations where they have teams like this at the top, or individuals like this at the top, making tons of decisions. They're either involved in making the wrong decisions and they should have never taken that decision on the first place. Or they're making decisions that don't matter. The stuff that got bubbled up to them that like, doesn't matter it's not important. You're making not important decisions. And all the while not making decisions aren't what they should have been focused on. Well also if you have some kind of like decision matrix. Where you're saying like, okay, for each decision, and maybe I tick some boxes, or maybe I do a certain amount of investigation or like we talked about earlier in the podcast, it's like, I want certain information before I make this decision. Yeah. Boy, if you're taking every single one of these decisions through that process and you're getting overwhelmed with decisions that you need to make, I would imagine that your decision making process is going to be slow. And you can probably shortcut that by saying like, well, maybe I don't need to do the rigorous research with every decision. Maybe I don't need to. Maybe I can make some gut decisions of how I feel about this feature or what customers are gonna buy, rather than doing any market research or whatever. And like, theoretically, that does sound good. And people will say, well, Brian, that's a nuance approach that you need to take. You know, you take a nuance approach. I mean, some decisions don't require as much. Yeah. As other, and I mean, generally I would agree with you also, but in the real world. The slippery slope is once you start down the path to the dark side and you're like, you know what? Ooh, there's no coming back. I can just make this decision. That's right. There's nobody here at the top in the ivory tower to challenge me. I, I think I'm great. You didn't execute well enough. It's, you look at me pointing fingers. Look at me. There you go. So, if you're one of those people who are increasingly having more and more shower thoughts about your decisions, maybe that's something you need to think about. Think about your life. That's what we're saying. Oh, man. 25 decisions. I mean, that that number obviously is arbitrary. Like he's just thrown out a number, right? It doesn't matter what it is, but even as like, you need to make a potentially business altering decision every two weeks that, that actually seems like. Fast pace of decision making to me. Yeah. If you're doing the groundwork before making that decision. I agree. I mean, in some cases, you could make decisions a little faster, but in most cases, two weeks is not out of the ordinary. Or maybe you need more even so it wouldn't be a rule of thumb that you have to make a decision every two weeks. It might be some decisions could take you a couple of months. Yeah.'cause you have to do all of that research and groundwork. Yeah. I mean, I kind of like the Venn diagram of where we get involved. Because again, it's like a clear mechanism for who makes what decisions. I mean that right there speeds up decision making. Like, Hey, this is, at least people know they're, you know. Their circle. right. So literally in this case the Venn diagram, so they know that if it's a decision that they should be making, they own it. If not, then they make sure that someone else owns it. His last point in the video was like, sometimes it doesn't work out and we can't come to a, we can't come to a consensus because one person is not aligned with where the team is going. And then we gotta basically put that person, we gotta put that person off at the next island and basically ruin them. I mean when consensus fails persistently, the solution is not compromised. It's removing the people that don't align with the direction of the team. And again, that assumes that you have a direction of your team and you're not just firing people that don't agree with you personally. Like this. This is the whole podcast here that we're hitting at the very end. And I left this to the end so it didn't dominate the podcast.'cause this is the one that I see people mess up the most. I mean, look, if you don't have a good sound framework for this, this becomes basically a scapegoat thing, right? The person who dissented the most, maybe they weren't even violently disagreeing, but they were bringing up valid points to consider. When the decision, whatever it was, went wrong or goes wrong, you're gonna say, that's the person. Yeah. You know, and vote'em off the island. That's terrible. But that happens. So if they, in this case two things happen. You make the wrong decision, blame someone else, but the company still suffered. That doesn't change. That might be, if that person was good, you lose some good people in the process. Well, the worst part of this is that now we're playing survivor where we gotta Outwit, outplay outlast this is the executive team in most places, to be honest, yeah. You're just like trying to say the right things to maintain your spot at the top of this guy you're just playing politics now trying to go along with decisions that people like, and you're not really that's not the point of this. You're undermining all of this. Just trying not to get kicked off the team. But if I'm not gonna look at this from the cynical view of you're just co-opting all this language and you're actually making the decision and brow beating everyone. Which we said earlier in the podcast, so Yeah. Yeah. I don't I probably shouldn't even brought this up if you're gonna, do this in a positive manner and you're gonna take everyone's contributions seriously there's a level of psychological safety that has to be established at this team. Yeah. I don't know, this is the toughest category for me.'cause I've not seen it in my professional career. Done well at the top tiers of the organization. It's rare. I have to confess it is rare. you're always gonna have people that philosophically disagree with things. Yeah. And unless they have a backbone you know, if they fold and give in. Under protest or whatever, that's one thing. But if they stand firm and they are booted out of the company which is what we've seen, I'm sure if you've been if you've worked for mid to large companies, you've seen people leave and it, it's the same text you get an email saying they're no longer with the company. We wish them well and thank them for their endless service and they're dead and we'll never talk about 'em again. Yeah. Sad. I mean, look, so I I could see this work, but like there are some guardrails here. Like it's like this group generally has to be stable over time. So like, I, I, I just, I won't believe you when you're saying we make the most important decisions with this group at the top. I like, I won't believe you if this group changes all the time I won't believe you. If like the, you, you, the first time someone is looked at as like, well, brian always dissents when we say we're gonna take on more debt at here at Insta Pot, and we're just gonna keep leveraging debt and whatever. And Brian keeps saying like, how are we gonna pay this debt? What are you worried about debt, Brian, you're gonna pay, you're a team player, Brian, you're not a team player. That's the majority of my experience. That would be my first question if I'm actually looking at this is how stable is this team? The team could be stable for long enough to persist. Especially if you see these other signs, like they're always blaming others but they're still gonna be around for a while, but every time something goes wrong, they're blaming others. So they could be around, that's fine. But are they really helping the company? Are they really doing the right thing? And do you really wanna stay there? those are the questions. so let's bring this one home with a, with the, probably the topic that I hate the most which is scaling. So Steve Jobs at next a million years ago. He had eight people on his policy team, right? And like now we have all these scaling things and scaling methodologies and we have global companies and whatnot. Is this even like possible. To scale a decision making framework. I mean, that's basically what we're kinda landing on in this podcast is like you have, you have to have some kind of decision making framework with some kind of boundaries and people need to know what the boundaries are and know their part of the boundaries. and then everyone just needs to know. So, I mean, if you've got a thousand people in like 10 different time zones is this possible? Possible? Yeah. Probable no. I would say if you are experiencing these sorts of issues at whatever scale you're at, if you're scaling up from there, those issues magnify. They become more critical, not less. So you've gotta figure this out, and it ends up being one of two things. Either it's completely chaotic across the board, which is not a good, healthy environment, or it becomes more like what Jensen was saying. You know, they're, the decisions are made by somebody central or a group that's central and passed down in a scenario that you just described where you have a company that's across multiple time zones with different regulatory environments, et cetera, et cetera, wouldn't it be better to trust people that are closest to the source to make those calls, then have those policies mm-hmm. Created that are universal policies, right? Mm-hmm. I mean, how often do we see that in, in large global companies? I mean, I'd rather just tell everybody what to do and write like the, the Roman Empire has like established a dictate to you on this date and just cast it down and then as you're talking, I'm thinking of all the potential pushbacks that I could say. Yeah well, it's like we can't get every, we got all these time zones. We're all super busy and we're all stretched thin and we got these profit margins and whatnot. You know what I mean? There's a lot of excuses here, right? Yeah. Excuses. And they, these excuses are challenges that you described, but they can also be. We want consistency across the board. So we're just gonna dictate that from corporate on down to everyone else. So there's many different forms that this takes a little bit of Jamie Dimon's rant had to do with this is like, for sure. Look, I'm in here on Saturday, whatever he said in the video I'm in here on Saturday and I'm working my butt off and I don't see any of you in here. And I I don't think you're taking it as seriously as I'm taking it. That that was part of his rant is like, right, you guys can't get together and make a decision. But I'm in here on Saturday and I don't see anybody like, but you tell me you're really busy. Part of that rant, which was like completely misdirected it, he was missing the point. But what we're saying is like, you, you can't cut out time that is set aside to where if you need to use it, you use it to make important decisions I do this for refining, like everybody, like my current company for example, I have run refinements on Monday. For years, and people still come up to me and it's like, Brian, I don't understand how decisions get made in your product line. Yeah. I mean, look, in some cases, yeah, this is going to happen. It should not happen however, or it should happen way less frequently to higher up. The organization, you go, you've got fewer people and the decisions have bigger ramifications right. So this excuse about, well we are in eight different time zones. We can't get together. These are serious decisions. You gotta be meeting at least quarterly in person. Sure, yeah so what excuse do you have? Right, right. Now of course you can get together if you want to. I would also say there should be a way for you to put the decisions that need to be made by that group, on that group's board well ahead of the decisions that need to be made.'cause you gotta be asking for evidence to be, I mean, sure. You know what I mean? You gotta be prepping. You can't just walk into a meeting and be like, we need to make a decision about this. And everyone's like, what are you talking about? What is that decision? This is the first time I'm hearing about it. Yeah. Those types of decisions may happen much, much lower down in the organization where you have to react quickly. But yes. These strategic type of decisions, you're right, they're not, they're not done in a snap. Yeah. Well, let's hit some, let's hit some great quotes that we wrote down before the podcast started. So it says, every time you ask someone to buy into a decision that they think is wrong, whether they tell you they think it's wrong or not right?'cause again, you're brow beating them or whatever. Yeah. You're essentially paying them to lie to you. So I, I like paying people to lie to my face. It's, I mean, it's fun, you know? Be, it's fun because I get to act surprise when the strategy fails. Ho Oh, I'm so shocked I thought you had my back. That's right. That's what happens, right? Steve jobs firing people who couldn't align wasn't ruthless. It was honest. Most organizations just let the misalignment fester until it kills the project. Anyway, that's an interesting statement. I think it takes a strong leader to take that step to say we have somebody who's philosophically just completely different than everybody else, and they're probably not gonna come around. In that case, it's best to part Company. Make the call be bold. That's not everybody. I mean, that, that assumes that you are making where, where does, where did the decision come from? Did it just come outta the blue? And most business decisions don't work like that. There's some sort of build or some sort of like funding that goes into a thing and then a thing kicks off and it goes in a particular direction. Like you can put somebody on the project or on the product, or you know, on a line of business or whatever that is well aligned to where it's going. That you probably are not gonna have this problem, this problem would happen. Say for example, in his model where you have a team of eight. And you get this one person who's just not gonna go along with anybody else because they just fundamentally are different. They think differently. They will not come along. If they don't, what are you gonna do? So in that case, you're not looking for perfection, you're not looking for all eight to agree. Consensus doesn't necessarily have to be that way. It could be majority. Decision. Everyone agrees for the most part out of eight. What does that look like? Mm-hmm five, six. Yeah. And run with it. But if that person is repeatedly always gonna be obtuse, at some point somebody has to decide to say, this is not really aligned with the way we work. Yeah. So give them a, an option to, to leave. I like it. That's my middle name or two. Or encourage them to leave. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yes. Encourage 'em quickly. Yeah. There is some very tactical, usable stuff that came outta this podcast. I mean, the drawing of the circles and putting what decisions that you need to make or what decisions are that you require to be made at the most senior level if you can only do it like that that's one thing you could do. I don't know if I would suggest it at like a middle management layer where you're playing this game of like, this goes above me and this is mine and this is yours. And 'cause now you're playing like the shell game of decision. Yeah. That's decision volleyball. I don't like that. I don't like that, but I like it at the highest level. Yeah. In the organization. I like that one. I like I like doing a proof concept by picking a decision that you've made recently and deciding like, Hey, did I need to make that? You know, I like that but generally, I'm pretty aligned with the three minute Steve Jobs clip that he just played. If for nothing else is that you don't have the illusion of participation and alignment, right? You really have alignment and that assumes, in that meeting where you have the team of eight or whatever people he had you can draw out the resistance and the conflict and you have the safety in that group to draw all that out and really put it all on the table and then use it to go through evidence to make an informed decision and a consensus and to drive consensus. Yeah, I agree. I think one other finding for me out of this video was the fact that not all decisions have to be made, right? Some can be deferred, some can be delegated, some can just be okay, entrusted, you make the decision. You don't need me to. Get involved. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, I think those are the key points outta this one today. Alright, well this one's another one for the record book. So yeah. And if you have decided to stay with us until now, make sure to like and subscribe.