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THE JUDGMENT CALL | Issue #7 | Thursday May 28, 2026
Reading time: 4 minutes. Worth every one if you have ever watched a great idea die in an approval queue.
You do not have a productivity problem.
You have a permission problem. And it is costing you more than your CFO can see.
His name was David. $280 million company. 600 employees. His best people were leaving.
Not for competitors. Not for more money. They were leaving because they were tired of waiting.
Waiting for approvals. Waiting for feedback. Waiting for someone above them to say the three most expensive words in corporate America: “Let me check.”
Every decision ran uphill. A VP needed three sign-offs to move a $4,000 budget line. A team lead needed a one-on-one with David to approve a software license that cost less than his monthly parking spot.
David thought he was staying informed. His team thought he was running a hostage situation. They were both right.
What David built was not a company. It was a permission machine with a Salesforce subscription.
And the scariest part? He had no idea. From the top, it felt like leadership. From the inside, it felt like a slow suffocation.
I have watched this happen to brilliant leaders more times than I can count. They build something remarkable, then they try to protect it by controlling it. One approval at a time. Until the best people stop bringing their best ideas and start updating their LinkedIn profiles instead.
Researchers just put a number on what that costs.
Companies lose up to 5% of annual revenue simply because decisions move too slowly. West Monroe surveyed over 1,200 leaders at companies with $250M or more in revenue and called it the Slowness Tax. 71% of executives say they have regretted making a decision too slowly. 34% say slow decisions directly caused their people to disengage.
On a $100 million company, that is $5 million a year dying in the Slack thread nobody ever finishes reading.
Jeff Bezos solved this decades ago with one rule: no team bigger than two pizzas can feed. Small teams. Clear ownership. Decisions are made where the information lives. He wrote it plainly: “Day 2 companies make high-quality decisions slowly. To keep the energy of Day 1, you need high-velocity decisions.” Amazon did not win on technology. They won on speed.
So here is what we actually did for David.
No new hires. No software. No reorg. We drew one line.
The 24-Hour Decision Rule
If a decision does not materially impact legal exposure, brand reputation, or cash flow above your defined threshold, the closest owner makes it within 24 hours. No escalation. No committee. No visibility loop. Define the threshold once. Then get out of the way.
Week three, he implemented it. Week eight, two top performers who had been quietly interviewing elsewhere told him they had taken themselves off the market. In month four, three initiatives that had been stuck in the queue for over a year shipped.
Nothing changed about the complexity of his business. Everything changed about who was allowed to move inside it.
Speed is not recklessness. Speed is respect.
When you make your people wait, you are telling them: I hired you for your judgment, but I do not trust your judgment. That is not leadership. That is management theater. And your best people can always see through the curtain.
Remove one bottleneck this week. Just one. Watch what it does to the energy in the room.
Your audit:
Where is your team waiting for permission they should not need? Which approvals exist out of habit, not necessity? If Bezos ran your org for 30 days, what would he cut first? What is the one bottleneck that, if removed today, changes everything tomorrow?
If this landed close to home, you might be one architecture fix away from a breakthrough quarter. The BOSS Legacy Diagnostic takes 8 minutes and shows you exactly where your Slowness Tax is hiding.
Take it here: highperformanceexecutivecoachi
Lisa Goldenthal Top 15 Executive Coach | WholeCEO With Lisa G HighPerformanceExecutiveCoachi
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