Week 35, 2022—Issue #218
Make Fewer Decisions: Words of Wisdom from Buffet, Bezos, and Hastings
Each week: three ideas to help you create better organizations. This week: three ideas for better decision-making. Originally published in the WorkMatters newsletter on Sep 2, 2022.
How many decisions have you made today? How many of them could you and should you have delegated to others?
One? Two? Some of them? Maybe most of them?
Decisions should be made by those closest to the problem, most of the time.
Chances are you should be delegating, also most of the time.
But don’t need to take my word for it. I’m in good company. Buffet, Bezos, and Hastings agree:
1. Warren Buffet
“You’d get very rich if you thought of yourself as having a [punch] card with only twenty punches in a lifetime, and every financial decision used up one punch. You’d resist the temptation to dabble.”
Warren Buffet is the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and one of the world’s most successful investors.
2. Jeff Bezos
“As a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do? You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day.”
Jeff Bezos is the founder and chairman of Amazon and one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time.
3. Reed Hastings
“At Netflix, we strive to develop good decision-making muscles everywhere in our company — and we pride ourselves on how few decisions senior management makes.”
Reed Hastings is the founder, chairman, and Co-CEO of Netflix, the world’s largest video streaming service.
Sometimes I wonder if I might be a better CEO if I worked part-time. Hours in the day are like holes in Buffet’s punch card. The more of them there are, the bigger the temptation to dabble in things that are best left to others. Less time would force me to focus only on the big picture.
But then I have to remind myself that it’s less about time and more about discipline. Time is valuable. It adds context. It helps build the understanding I need for the decisions that I should make. Discipline is what stops me from making decisions that I can make but shouldn’t.
That’s all for this week.
Until next time: make it matter.
How can we build better organizations? That’s the question I’ve been trying to answer for the past 10 years. Each week, I share some of what I’ve learned in a weekly newsletter called WorkMatters. Subscription is free. Back-issues are published to Medium after three months.
