What playing cricket for the U.S. taught me about the hardest decisions CEOs face
Identify the few decisions that actually change the game CEOs don’t create value by making the most decisions.
Key points
- But that is exactly where CEOs have to add value: choosing among plausible paths when information is incomplete and waiting for certainty has a cost of its own.
- If an organization works properly, people make thousands of decisions about products, customers and operations every day.
- Those questions matter, but they come after a harder one: Have we correctly understood what is possible?
The cricket analogy I used internally was simple: We were playing as though we were on a 200-run pitch.
Decide what the conditions actually support When I joined Bluebeam, I had to determine not simply whether the company was performing well, but what it could become.
Additional details
- No single decision explains a company’s growth, and user counts alone don’t show what caused it.
- Ambition must be grounded in what the market, product, and organization can support.
- Long before I became a CEO, I played international cricket for the United States.
- That simplified our strategy and freed resources to invest in what we did well.
- But the results strengthened my belief that focusing on a proven strength could be more valuable than chasing an adjacent opportunity simply because it was attracting attention.
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