Who Decides? The Question Every Scaling Company Answers by Default
A company can have capable leaders, adequate resources, and strong market opportunities—and still struggle to scale.
One often-overlooked reason is that the organization has outgrown its decision-making process.
As businesses grow, leadership delegates responsibilities, but decision-making authority often remains concentrated at the top. Managers or leads become accountable for results they cannot fully control, routine decisions require unnecessary approvals, and executives spend time on issues that should be resolved elsewhere.
I’ve encountered these challenges firsthand, as a founder and an operating executive.
In my latest article, “Who Decides? The Question Every Scaling Company Answers by Default,” I examine the research, the operating consequences of poorly defined decision rights, and practical approaches to developing leaders who can exercise sound judgment and make decisions within clear boundaries.
Scaling requires more than delegating responsibilities. It requires building an organization that can make and execute sound decisions without everything flowing back to the top.
What Supports Sustainable Scaling in Today’s Dynamic Business Environment?
As organizations grow, complexity often increases faster than the systems designed to manage it. What looks like a sales problem, an execution problem, or a leadership problem may actually be a deeper issue of organizational alignment. In this conversation, Jeneen Masih and Alejandro Di Tolla explore how leadership, operations, communication, trust, and decision-making must work together to build an organization capable of scaling sustainably.
That stays close to what the article actually delivers rather than turning the excerpt into promotional copy. The article specifically argues that different functions often see legitimate but incomplete parts of the problem, and that sustainable scale requires a more systemic view.
The Distance Between R&D and Revenue
Some R&D cycles take years because the technology is genuinely difficult. Others take years because the operating model around the technology makes them difficult.
In this article, I examine what happened when we stopped treating development speed as an R&D problem and instead looked at the entire path from customer need to commercial revenue. By changing how we validated assumptions, committed capital, coordinated across functions, and defined the outcome, we turned development cycles measured in years into months—at a fraction of the expected cost. The broader lesson: before adding resources to accelerate R&D, understand where the time, capital, and organizational friction are actually going.
Everyone Blames the Cash. The Cash Was the Last Domino.
“We ran out of cash.”
That’s how a lot of startup post-mortems end.
But running out of cash is often the last domino—not the first.
The decisions that actually put the company in trouble may have happened 6, 12, or 18 months earlier: scaling customer acquisition before retention was proven, entering another market before the economics worked, adding headcount ahead of repeatable demand, or committing capital against assumptions that hadn’t been sufficiently tested.
The research is striking. A recent analysis of 431 VC-backed companies that shut down found that running out of capital was a factor in 70% of the failures. But the underlying problems started earlier.
In this article, I break down the four-step operating approach I use to diagnose the problem, identify the real constraint, and determine what—if anything—the company should scale next.