The Decision Nobody Wanted To Make

Everyone in the room knew. That is the detail he keeps returning to.

It was not a data problem. The analysis had been circulated twice. The division was losing money, would continue to lose money, and was consuming the attention of the four best operators in the company. Closing it was, on paper, obvious.

"We had eight intelligent adults who all privately agreed and collectively did nothing for seven months," he says. "I've thought about that more than anything else in my career."

**The physics of avoidance**

The division had a face. It had been the founder's first business. It employed sixty people, several of whom had been there a decade. Closing it would not be a line item; it would be an act performed on people with names.

So the meetings developed a shape. Someone would present a scenario in which the division could be saved. Everyone would engage seriously with the scenario. The scenario would require a customer, a hire, or a market that did not exist. The meeting would end with an action to "explore it further."

"Exploration is the most respectable form of cowardice available to a leadership team," he says. "It looks like diligence. It feels like responsibility. It is neither."

Every month of delay cost roughly what four salaries cost. By the end, the avoidance had spent more money than the severance would have.

**What broke the loop**

A junior finance analyst, six weeks into the job, asked in a meeting why the same options kept being re-examined. There was, he remembers, a very long pause.

"She had not yet learned what we were all protecting," he says. "We were not protecting the division. We were protecting ourselves from being the person who said the sentence."

He said the sentence the following week. He had rehearsed it and it still came out badly.

**Doing it properly**

Once the decision existed, the work became specific and, in a strange way, easier. They gave the division eleven weeks rather than the legal minimum. They funded outplacement. They redeployed nineteen people internally — more than anyone expected, because managers who had avoided the topic entirely suddenly found roles once the ambiguity ended.

He personally told the founder before anyone else. That conversation lasted three hours and he will not describe most of it.

"The thing I got wrong was not the decision," he says. "It was believing that delay was a neutral act. Delay is a decision. It is just a decision you get to make without signing your name."

**The rules he leads by now**

He keeps a short list.

If we are re-examining the same option a third time, the answer is no, and we say it that day.

The person who benefits most from the delay must be named in the room.

Any decision involving people gets a date attached in the first meeting, even a provisional one. Dates convert avoidance into work.

He is not comfortable being the subject of a story about leadership. "There is no heroism here," he says. "Sixty people paid seven months of uncertainty for our discomfort. That is the actual cost of a leadership team that would rather be liked than clear."

The question he now asks his own directors is a simple one: What do we all already know, that nobody has said in this room yet?

It is, he says, the only question that has ever reliably saved him money.