Leaders should make fewer decisions by pushing decisions back to domain experts and questioning whether the need for a decision indicates an underlying organizational or institutional failure, rather than treating decision-making as the primary lever of leadership.
normativepending
Speaker
Patrick CollisonEvidence Quote
“the third thing is uh i now try to fairly deliberately just make fewer decisions in that why am i making the decision uh and for some kind of decisions you know there are some um good reasons for that and there's some decisions the ceo ought to make and is kind of fundamentally on the hook for but there are some decisions where if i'm making it or if i have to make it that probably suggests that something else organizationally or institutionally has broken and i think the need for a decision uh from anyone not just for me is often like only a sort of um an epi phenomenon and there's really some other underlying issue that's causing you to have to make in the first place”
Source
Patrick Collison: Philosophies for Running Stripe, Hiring, Decision Making, and Reading— The Knowledge Project PodcastCreated: 8/10/2026, 11:17:01 PM
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