To avoid bureaucratic slowdown, LEGO's CEO broke his leadership team into smaller, empowered subgroups like a "commercial triangle" (CCO, COO, CMO). These groups handle operational decisions, only escalating disagreements. This has cut full executive meetings to just one hour a month plus quarterly strategy sessions.
Related Insights
The "Decision Ladder" is a framework for radical empowerment. By giving every employee permission to spend a small amount (e.g., $50) to solve any problem—with increasing authority for managers and directors—you eliminate approval delays and foster a culture of ownership.
To avoid stifling teams with bureaucracy, leaders should provide slightly less structure than seems necessary. This approach, described as "give ground grudgingly," forces teams to think actively and prevents the feeling of "walking in the muck" that comes from excessive process. It's a sign of a healthy system when people feel they need a bit more structure, not less.
To empower your team, enforce the '1-3-1 rule' for problem-solving. Before anyone can escalate an issue to you, they must define the one problem, research three potential solutions, and present their single best recommendation. This forces critical thinking and shifts the team from problem-spotters to problem-solvers.
The pandemic's urgency forced Walmart's leadership to accelerate its meeting cadence from a weekly/monthly rhythm to a daily one. This faster pace necessitated greater delegation, revealing the high quality and speed of decisions made by empowered associates throughout the organization.
Create a clear hierarchy of spending authority to eliminate decision bottlenecks. For example, any employee can spend up to $50 to solve a customer problem, managers up to $500, and directors up to $5,000, no questions asked. This empowers the team to make swift decisions without waiting for approval.
As companies grow from 30 to 200 people, they naturally become slower. A CEO's critical role is to rebuild the company's operating model, deliberately balancing bottom-up culture with top-down strategic planning to regain speed and ensure everyone is aligned.
To avoid becoming a bottleneck, create a decision framework with tiered spending authority (e.g., $50 for any employee, $500 for managers). This pushes problem-solving down to the people with the most context, freeing up the CEO and speeding up operations.
Contrary to the popular bottoms-up startup ethos, a top-down approach is crucial for speed in a large organization. It prevents fragmentation that arises from hundreds of teams pursuing separate initiatives, aligning everyone towards unified missions for faster, more coherent progress.
LEGO's CEO has settled on a four-year strategic planning cycle as the ideal cadence. He finds three-year plans create a constant sense of urgency, while five-year plans feel too abstract. A four-year horizon is long enough to execute major initiatives but short enough to remain tangible and relevant.
Instead of using meetings for context-setting, Loom’s team sends a required 'pre-watch' video walkthrough of the strategy. This forces stakeholders to arrive with full context, allowing the live meeting to be shorter and entirely focused on critique, asking clarifying questions, and making decisions.
