Decision Latency Is the New CEO Metric
In this monologue, Darren Goonawardana argues that traditional CEO performance metrics—headcount growth, revenue per employee, and AI adoption—miss the critical factor of organizational speed in the AI era. He defines "decision latency" as the time from an external or internal signal (customer request, competitor move, AI model output, risk detection) to a high‑quality business action, highlighting that meetings, handoffs, approvals, and looping discussions inflate this latency. Goonawardana contends that AI does not automatically accelerate companies; instead, it reveals existing sluggishness by exposing decision bottlenecks. He calls on CEOs to redesign their operating systems to push decision‑making to the edge, clarify ownership and context, and enable rapid escalation when judgment is required. The core recommendation is to identify the most important decisions, assign clear owners, provide necessary context, and measure the signal‑to‑action time as the primary executive metric.
