May 13, 2026
Hi Everyone,
If every big decision at your company needs your sign-off, your company can only move as fast as you can respond.
McKinsey tracked 2,393 companies over a decade. The ones that made two or more bold strategic moves were about six times more likely to break into the top 20% of their industry.
The companies that sustained those moves built structures that let the whole team make big calls. Today, we’re sharing three such structures you can set up this quarter.
Write the decision down before the meeting
Amazon banned slide decks from leadership meetings in 2004. Every meeting opens with 20 to 30 minutes of silent reading of a memo written by the team proposing the idea.
The reasoning is practical – slides make it easy to gloss over weak thinking, a written memo forces the author to work through the logic end-to-end, and silent reading prevents the discussion from being shaped by whoever speaks first.
Stripe runs a similar model. Every team maintains a living strategy document, and meetings open with reading rather than presenting. Claire Hughes Johnson, Stripe's former COO, introduced a useful classification she called "trapdoor decisions" (calls that are hard to reverse and deserve slow, written deliberation). Everything else should be decided quickly by the person closest to the work.
Require a one-page brief from anyone proposing a major decision. The brief should cover what you're deciding, the options, their recommendation, and what would change their mind. If there's no brief, the meeting doesn't happen.
(If you want a ready-made structure for this, our template includes a decision memo format you can use for this.)
Give feedback without giving orders
Pixar's Braintrust meets regularly to review films in progress. The group includes directors and storytellers who give candid feedback on what's working and what isn't.
Two rules make it effective:
- Members must be practitioners who have done the kind of work they're critiquing.
- And the Braintrust has no authority over the project, so the director can ignore every suggestion.
Ed Catmull, Pixar's co-founder, designed this around a specific belief. Every film starts out flawed, and only honest feedback from experienced peers makes it better. But feedback attached to power shuts people down. The director keeps full control while hearing perspectives they'd otherwise miss.
You can apply this to any major initiative. Bring together experienced peers from outside the initiative's direct team to stress-test the plan. Run it quarterly for your biggest strategic bets, or whenever a project crosses a major commitment point. The owner still makes the final call.
Tell your team which decisions are theirs
In growing companies, decisions pile up at the top. Pricing experiments, feature launches, vendor choices, and campaign decisions all land on the founder's or CEO’s desk because nobody has been told which calls they can make on their own.
Jeff Bezos warned about exactly this in his 2015 letter to Amazon shareholders. Growing organizations tend to apply their heaviest decision-making process to nearly every decision, including ones that are easily reversed. The result is that teams stop experimenting because every experiment feels like it needs executive approval.
The fix is a written list of decisions that genuinely require your involvement. Pricing model changes, key hires, market entry, and strategic partnerships probably belong on it. Feature experiments, vendor selections, process changes, and internal tooling probably don't.
Share the list with your leadership team. Anything not on it is theirs to decide.
(Our Decision Defaults Playbook walks you through five areas, including spending, hiring, customer exceptions, internal requests, and operations, with ready-made rules you can fill in and share with your team.)
Try this today
Pick one decision that's currently waiting on you. Would the result actually suffer if someone else handled it? If not, send them a message today with what they need to know and let them run with it.
Go deeper
👉 Fast Company: Inside The Pixar Braintrust – Ed Catmull on how the Braintrust works, why it has no authority, and what makes candid feedback productive without killing ownership
👉 First Round Review: The 6 Decision-Making Frameworks That Help Startup Leaders Tackle Tough Calls – covers Claire Hughes Johnson's Stripe framework, Annie Duke on decision quality, and other ownership models for fast-growing teams
👉 McKinsey: Bold moves are less risky than a timid corporate strategy – the data behind why companies making multiple bold moves outperform, and why incrementalism is the riskiest approach of all
Coming up tomorrow
Tomorrow we're sharing a simple calculation that shows how much cash is tied up inside your business and where to free it first.
That's it for today!
P.S. Have you ever given a team member full ownership of a big call? How did it go? We'd love to hear.