Nathan Barry argues founders waste energy overthinking routine decisions. A Harvard Business study found that roughly one-third of CEO decisions turn out negative, one-third neutral, one-third positive, so speed matters more than getting everything right.
The stakes aren't always life or death. And sometimes I see founders and leaders get stuck on this. Like all the decisions feel like life or death decisions, and therefore I'm stuck in this analysis paralysis, whereas I can recognize actually the stakes are kind of low here. The higher risk thing is delaying, right? You're dragging your feet on it. And I will often quote this. I think it was a Harvard Business study of essentially the effectiveness of decision-making from CEOs. And they found roughly that a third of the time decisions were negative, a third of the time they were neutral, a third of the time they were positive. So the way I think about it is like, okay, two-thirds of the time you're going to make a neutral or a positive decision. So speed is more important than right.
