All Posts in Office Politics

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Hierarchical decision-making is rooted in levels of authority, not in depth of expertise and specific knowledge of the situation.

It isn’t entirely foolish, either: Presumably, those higher in the hierarchy (which might be a pun but I doubt it) are there because in the past they demonstrated leadership and good judgment in their areas of responsibility.

The world changes faster, though and the detailed knowledge needed to handle a responsibility increases. The result: Those with the proper authority to make a decision are, to an ever greater extent, insulated from both the knowledge and the information necessary to make it well, let alone fast enough for it to be useful.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses,'” Henry Ford famously said. The lesson is clear: Your inner muse is a more reliable source of information than all the market surveys you can afford.

What Ford didn’t say was, “If I had listened to people when they told me what they wanted, I’d have offered a new model instead of insisting the Model T was all they’d ever want, nearly wrecking my company with my stubbornness.”

The world is more complicated than the simple stories we prefer.

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