-Steve Jobs advocates for Consensus: the key is getting everyone in a room to agree
-Jeff Bezos advocates for Disagree and Commit: you aren’t going to get everyone to agree and at some point you need to make a decision and move on
Two epic and successful CEOs, so who is right?
I’m with Bezos. The Jobs approach is nice in principle but it comes with a huge cost: time. (Also if you’ve read and believe Issacson’s book on Jobs, you may question how much he actually believed this principle.) It’s hugely time consuming to get everyone to agree to something. If you operate in an environment where Control is the most important thing, then you may choose a decision making framework that leverages consensus because it’s slower and as a consequence easier for a leader to follow every decision a company makes.
But if you want to go fast and pace of delivery is an important cultural value, then you need to make decisions. And you’re going to make A LOT of decisions with imperfect data and conflicting points of view. That works in my opinion as long as everyone is committed.
Last thought: you should develop a mental scorecard on decisions that were met with huge disagreement. If a leader is constantly making decisions that later turn out to be the wrong call, that should affect how often they’re the one everyone is following. Furthermore, companies tend to be better at controversial decisions in certain categories than others (for example, product vs recruiting). That’s normal, just pay attention to it!
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This post was originally shared by Will Ahmed on Linkedin.