Intent-based leaders push the decision making to the people with the information. Here’s David with more.
You’re probably slower than you think. And you can probably be a lot faster.
I’m here well above the Swiss town of Grindelwald. And behind me is the mighty north face of the Eiger. I’m at 6400 feet, it peaks out at 13,026 feet. That’s over one mile vertically above us.
Now the north face of the Eiger was first climbed in 1938 by a team that took three days to get to the top. Guess what the fastest time now is? Write it down – two and a half hours. What? That’s unbelievable! Better gear, multiple routes, people trying different things, blah, blah, blah. But the point is, for all human history – never done. Then less than 100 years ago – three days. Now – less than three hours.
And when you’re running a company and you’re doing things at the three-day pace, you think, like, you’re doing pretty good, you feel pretty good. Clients aren’t complaining, things are getting done. But there’s another company that’s doing something that’s a two-and-a-half-hour pace. And you could be faster. The trick is to push the decision making to the people with the information. We say, “push authority to information.” You can be faster.
This is the hardest thing to detect. Errors come back to you. Wasted projects come back to you. You cancel, it shows up as waste. But just in general not being as fast as we can be, no one ever reports on that. So go faster. Push authority to information.
Here – oh, by the way, I am not going up there – I’m David Marquet. That’s your Leadership Nudge – up at the bottom of the Eiger above Grindelwald.
