I ran a company of 50 people, and I made almost none of the decisions.
That sounds like a failure of leadership. It was the opposite.
Someone would come to me and ask, “Should we build the app for iOS or Android?” My answer was always the same: You decide — and tell me why. Which vendor do we use to print the PCBs? You decide. What’s the budget for it? You decide that too. I had people setting their own workdays, choosing their own tools, owning their own calls. Fifty people, and most of the decisions in the company were being made by the person closest to the actual work.
Here’s what I learned doing it.
When the idea is theirs, action is instant
When someone brings me an idea, that idea turns into action fast — because it’s already theirs. They’re not waiting for permission. They’re not building a slide to convince me. They’ve decided, they’ve told me why, and they’re moving. The energy is completely different when the decision belongs to the person carrying it out. Ownership isn’t a motivational poster. It’s a speed setting.
And when someone didn’t have an idea? That’s where I came in. Not to hand them the answer — to sit with them and talk it through. They’d bring me a 2 and a 2, and together we’d make it 4. Then it was theirs again, and they were off. My job wasn’t to decide for them. It was to make sure they could.
What that freed me to do
Pushing the decisions down freed me up for the one thing only I could do: innovate. Look ahead. Find the next thing worth building. I wasn’t stuck approving small stuff, refereeing which vendor or which font, sitting in rooms describing work instead of doing it.
But make no mistake — I was hands-on. Deeply. I just picked the right place to put my hands. And I expected everyone else to be hands-on too. No passengers. If you were on the team, you were building, deciding, shipping.
Action every day. No meetings.
I mean that almost literally. We didn’t gather to plan the next gathering. We didn’t spend our mornings updating each other on work we could have been doing instead. We did the work, every day, and the decisions happened where the work was.
Turns out this isn’t just a small-team trick
For a long time I assumed this only worked because we were small — 50 people, everyone within shouting distance. Then I watched Bayer’s CEO, Bill Anderson, describe running the exact same playbook across a 100,000-person company. He calls it dynamic shared ownership. Same core moves: push about 95% of decisions to the people doing the work, organize small teams around a mission instead of stacking departments, and turn managers from approvers into supporters. He went from 16,000 managers to 4,500, and told a room of thousands that everything roughly doubled in speed.
He also named the thing I’d felt but never articulated: the hierarchy itself is the problem. You can’t slowly improve your way out of it. The approvals, the silos, the meetings-about-meetings — they’re built into the structure. You don’t fix bureaucracy. You refuse to build it in the first place.
That’s what “you decide” really is. It’s a structural choice. Every time I said it, I was declining to add another layer between a person and their own work.
The whole thing in one line
If you trust people to do the work, trust them to make the calls about the work. Give them the why, ask them for their whyback, and get out of the way. When they have the idea, you get speed. When they don’t, you coach — two and two into four — and hand it back.
Then go do the thing only you can do.
Action every day. No meetings.