You may have been promoted without noticing

The title is worse than it sounds.

Hi,

Let me ask you something I ask CEOs all the time.

How many decisions reached you last week that somebody else could have made?

Take a second.

Most leaders guess low.

Five?

Ten?

Twenty?

Congratulations.

You may have promoted yourself to Chief Permission Officer.

Terrible title.

Worse comp plan.

No equity.

Now let’s put a number on it.

Say twelve unnecessary decisions reach you every week.

Twenty minutes each, once you include the context switching nobody counts.

That is four hours a week.

Sixteen hours a month.

Close to two hundred hours a year.

Now put your real value on those hours.

Not salary divided by 2,080.

Your actual value.

What is one clear strategic decision worth when you make it well?

That is what weak decision architecture quietly costs.

And you will never see it neatly labeled on the P&L.

So your assignment this week is not a restructure.

Not another retreat.

Not another tool.

Count.

For seven days, tally every decision and approval that reaches you and probably should not have.

Because you cannot remove a bottleneck you refuse to measure.

Want the one-page tally?

Reply BOTTLENECK , and I will send it.

And yes, I read the replies.

Lisa

P.S. If your answer is “nobody brings me anything,” one of two things may be true.

You built something extraordinary.

Or nobody is telling you anything.

Both are useful to know.