When Less is More

How Leaders Can Create Maximum Value

I have been having an interesting email exchange with Mark Fuller, my friend and former boss as CEO of Monitor Company during my entire time there. I started to think that maybe the subject was worth a piece. So, I have written this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece on When Less is More: How Leaders Can Create Maximum Value. As always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here.

Background

We were having a back and forth on a related subject but at one point in that conversation I put forward my view that leaders should make the fewest decisions possible, and he was intrigued about why I seemed to be so adamant about it. He didn’t disagree – he was just curious. Since he is a wonderful practitioner, advisor and student of strategy, I thought that if he is interested in the topic, others would be as well.

This is by no means a new topic for me. I have written generally about it three previous times. But I haven’t provided thorough reasoning on why I feel it is so important for leaders at every level of a company to make as few decisions as possible.

I discussed it first in 2020 in Strategic Choice Chartering as the first of the six steps of the process of chartering strategic choices. The first step was to “make the only choice that you are more capable of making than anyone else.” I argued that: “Effective executives at all levels make the few choices that their experience, wisdom and perspective make them better equipped to make than anyone else — and stop there.” But I kind of stopped there too and didn’t explain that minimalist view.

Then I discussed it in again in 2023 in What Choices to Make – and Not. I did advance the argument for minimalism: “Leadership is about making only the choices that you are best positioned to make — and not making the ones for which you aren’t, even if you are more senior than the person who will make the choice.” I did touch on the human resource developmental rationale for it but didn’t go into it as extensively as I will do below.

I focused more on finance scholar Michael Jensen’s specific knowledge argument, which is that someone lower in the organization can often have specific knowledge concerning a task/decision that others higher in the organization don’t. For example, a surgeon has specific knowledge about the patient that the hospital CEO lacks, even though the CEO is much more senior. So, it is leaderly to not attempt to make decisions for which subordinates have more specific knowledge.

Finally, I discussed it in a co-authored (with longtime collaborator AG Lafley) Harvard Business Review article called Leaders Shouldn’t Try to do it All. We argued that to be an effective leader, you should: 1) remove all tasks for which you lack any absolute advantage; 2) delegate tasks for which you have little comparative advantage; 3) take on tasks for which you have a strong comparative advantage; and 4) make sure you have enough time for the tasks that only you can do. Again, it is a less-is-more argument that focuses on being highly selective as to tasks that you take on versus subordinates.

But to be more specific, there are two major reasons that I am adamant in my advice for leaders to make the minimum possible choices: people development and possibility expansion. This applies to leaders at all levels, whether CEO or leader of a small department.

People Development

Maybe it is because I am getting old and am rationalizing, but it feels ever more evident to me that without lots of practice, very few people become good at anything important. It may often seem otherwise at first blush. When the Beatles played Shea Stadium, they appeared to the adoring American audience as child savants (Harrison 22, McCartney 23, Lennon 24, and Starr 25). But Beatles historians would eventually chronicle that prior to showing up in America, they had performed a stunningly large number of shows – well over 1,000 – mainly in Liverpool and Hamburg, making them as seasoned veterans as anybody in the business.

People often referred to AG Lafley as a ‘natural strategist’ given the fabulous job he did in strategically turning around P&G between 2000 and 2009. But when I talked to him about his time as a Navy Exchange Officer (which entailed running the retail stores that served Navy personnel on the base) at the Atsugi US Navy base in Japan, it was clear to me that he was practicing strategy then as a mere 25 to 28-year-old. And he continued practicing strategy during his entire time at P&G, which I had the pleasure of watching from his early 40’s onward. By the time he became CEO at 53 years old, he was one of the most practiced strategists I had ever met.

And surgical performance statistics reveal that the single most important question you should ask of surgeons when deciding who is going to cut you open and sew you back up is not “do you practice at Cleveland Clinic?” Or “did you train at Harvard Medical School?” It is how many times have you performed this exact surgery before?

Reps (i.e. practice repetitions) are currency. And every time you, as a leader, take a rep away from a subordinate, you are transferring currency from the subordinate to you. If you want to surround yourself with truly great people, it is your leadership obligation to give them as many decision-making reps as possible.

It is not all-or-nothing. You don’t have to give decisions entirely to subordinates who you don’t believe are ready. In this PTW/PI piece called How to Help Your People Make Better Strategy Choices, I describe a tool I call The Responsibility Ladder (drawn from my first book, The Responsibility Virus). If you don’t think a subordinate is ready to take full responsibility, you don’t have to take it entirely yourself. You can go one step down the ladder and ask the subordinate to come back with a recommendation for you to review and make the choice. And if the subordinate isn’t ready for that, to come back with possibilities. And if not ready for that, watch and learn. All those interim ladder steps help the subordinate move up in responsibility until such time as the leader can cease needing to make a set of decisions.

The goal is to push decision responsibility to someone on a steeper learning curve than you. You will learn as you increase your reps, but you should be on a shallower part of the learning curve than your subordinates. Push hard – even take some chances. But the core principle is to minimize your choice-making for the learning benefit of your people – again, regardless of the level of your leadership.

Possibility Expansion

If you believe you have talent and you love your business, you likely have no idea the magnitude of incremental good you can do by having additional free time to deploy. Also, you are unlikely to appreciate in advance the range of new ideas you will proliferate by having subordinates tackle decisions and imagine possibilities you never would have.

On the first point, I guess I am an evangelist because of my own experience as dean of Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto. I worked hard to get rid of 100 days on time on prior dean’s schedules. That opened up possibilities for me to add value for Rotman that were not previously imaginable when tied down by the 100 days of obligations that I was able to get fulfilled by others who were capable of making great decisions – but no other dean allowed them to own and make. Outside observers thought I worked 24x7 because I got so much done. But they couldn’t see that 100 days/year of tasks they assumed I was doing were, in fact, being done by others.

On the second point, I believe that by pushing decisions to subordinates, you unearth possibilities that you would have never imagined. If you keep the decision to yourself, the only possibilities are the ones in your head. If you give out the responsibility for deciding, you will generate more creative possibilities. It is like going from a one-person R&D department (you) to a big one (all your subordinates).

But it is one of those elusive things in management. It is easier to comprehend the choices that you are normally supposed to make and understand their likely output. It is much harder to estimate in advance the value of possibilities that you might find on choices on which you haven’t before worked or that your subordinates may come up with after being given choice-making responsibility you previously held. So, you need some faith.

On this point, I remember a meeting I had with Steve Ballmer (at the time he was Microsoft CEO) telling me that he and Bill Gates (then Chairman & Chief Software Architect) gave each other the right to scrutinize each other’s calendars and challenge the time spent. I was intrigued at the time, thinking that was good discipline.

But as time has gone on, the stars of both Gates and Ballmer have dimmed considerably – and more of that to come on both fronts – and I began to wonder when I had considered the practice uncritically because I had stars in my eyes. I began to wonder whether that practice inadvertently made sure that all their time was devoted to the most standard activities and none on creative possibilities. Perhaps that is why Satya Nadella had such a turnaround challenge when he came on board. But who knows. Maybe that practice had no impact.

Practitioner Insights

I have always maintained that the only way for companies to prosper persistently over time is to figure out a way to do next year what they did the past year but with 3-5% fewer resources. That enables them to use those (optimally) 5% of resources to deliver new value to customers. Maybe the first year the benefits won’t be amazing, but if the company cumulates them over the years, it will enable itself to deliver great things and thereby prosper. It is an analog of Warren Buffett’s enthusiasm for the power of compound interest.

Think of the same for yourself. What 5% of decisions that you currently make, could you offload to a capable subordinate? That is a mere one decision in twenty that you make – totally doable. If you don’t think you can offload one in twenty, you have a significant leadership problem. You aren’t developing your people – and you are probably incenting the very best of them to leave by suppressing their progress.

You may instead think that it is a modest effort – only one in twenty? Remember, I did the moral equivalent of a 40% cut in my first year as dean (I say moral equivalent because I cut 40% of days, which isn’t exactly 40% of decisions – but it is probably close). AG Lafley did something not dissimilar when he came back for his second stint as CEO of P&G.

If you can offload more than one in twenty, it is a big plus. Your people will gain motivation and expertise, and they will provide you with insights that may never have occurred to you. Meanwhile, you can take aim at thinking about issues about which you would never have been able, had you not offloaded legacy decisions – and by doing so show that less can indeed be more.