Should organizations centralize decision-making functions or push decisions to the individuals closest to the problem?
4 recorded positions from 4 people, first said Jun 28, 2021. They do not agree — the readings below are what each one actually argued.
Decentralize decisions to those closest to the problem to avoid bureaucracy
Jeff Lawson · Jun 28, 2021
A strictly hierarchical company, where the person with the highest title makes most decisions based on opinion, gut feel and pattern matching, is fragile; decision-making should be distributed by inverting the pyramid so new ideas can surface.
No new idea becomes a billion-dollar business overnight, and you never know which idea will be the next billion-dollar one, so top-level budget holders applying a needle-moving bar systematically shut down things that were working.
23:30 20VC: Twilio's Jeff Lawson on What It Takes To Create a Tribe, How To Create Anti-Fragile Organisations Through Decentralised Decision-Making and Why Values Are Nice But Principles Are Better
Kaz Nejatian · Aug 14, 2024
The chain-of-command pattern where ideas travel up the hierarchy for approval before coming back down is terrible, and it is fine for a manager to learn something at the same time as the whole company
That pattern is universal but it bottlenecks information and hides ideas from the people who could improve them
Scope: it still happens at Shopify sometimes
42:06 20VC: Lessons from Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Rabois & Tobi Lütke | Why Remote is a Bad Idea for 90% of Companies | The Framework for How Shopify Builds Product Today | What Humans Get Wrong About Marriage and Kids with Kaz Nejatian, COO @ Shopify
Peter Rahal · Aug 8, 2025
The biggest mistake from RXBAR not to repeat is allowing a culture of bureaucracy; instead individuals need high agency and decisions should be made closest to the problem
Centralized functions create dependencies for decision making and slow the org down; decentralization keeps it fast
56:06 20VC: The $BN Greenoaks Backed Protein Bar | Hitting $100M Revenues in David's First Year: Lessons & Mistakes | $0 to $600M: The Untold RXBAR Story | Product-Market-Fit, Pricing, Branding: What Every Founder Gets Wrong Today with Peter Rahal
Also on the record
Tobi Lütke · Apr 3, 2023
A company should compose into an idea lab where the people closest to a problem and the people with the widest perspective come together to make the best choices
That structure gives everyone a role in decision-making rather than routing decisions by title
43:27 Combine people closest to the problem with those having the widest perspective into an idea lab
Your assistant can query this graph directly — 4 positions here, 19,646 across the corpus. Add 996.fm over MCP.