What If You're Not the Mastermind?
Why good decisions beat good ideas (and how your brilliance might be killing your business).
I recently interviewed Michael Morton from Federal Merchants. He spoke directly about the role his teams have played in achieving strategic success for Scotch. Harnessing the power of your team (however you put that team together) is the difference between a good idea and a winning strategy. Read on..
Businesses need good decisions more than they need good ideas.
Let that sink in for a moment. Because if you’re a founder, there’s a good chance you’ve got the equation backwards. After all, this business is your baby. It came from within you. This idea all started with you.
The most dangerous position in business is being a business leader who’s fallen in love with being the ideas person. The only one who comes up with solutions, the one who always gets their way. You’ve got more than skin in the game, it’s emotional investment. I’ve seen thriving businesses brought to their knees because an ideas person didn’t just need to succeed, they needed to succeed doing things their way. A game of ego and identity, and not just business anymore. You know the ones—every strategic decision or marketing tactic has to go up the chain to the big boss, because they’re personally invested in every move. Heck, it used to be me.
These are the moments your brain starts playing tricks on you. Back in 1974, psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman published their landmark paper “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” demonstrating how people systematically seek information that confirms their existing beliefs while ignoring contradictory evidence. It’s called Confirmation Bias. When it’s your idea? That bias goes into overdrive.
Creativity and productivity go hand in hand for most founders, but when times are tough, it’s time to stop being the ‘ideas’ person and start stepping up as the tougher, less glamorous “decisions” guy role. Your business needs a cohesive set of leadership skills—ideas, execution, and objective decision-making—and it doesn’t matter where those skills come from. But here’s the problem: if you’re the only person who’s always coming up with the solutions, your ability to make tough, objective decisions is under threat. You can’t be both the architect and the quality inspector. Not effectively.
The Trap You Can’t See
Studies on entrepreneurial decision-making show that confirmation bias causes founders to latch onto information that confirms pre-existing beliefs while dismissing naysayers or negative information, which can lead to the death of a startup. You start seeing only the evidence that supports your vision. Research shows that professionals across management are particularly prone to overconfidence bias—especially CEOs—which significantly impacts their decision-making.
It’s like being a blender who falls in love with their own recipe before anyone else has tasted it so doesn’t bother getting feedback. Justin Fenchel, founder of BeatBox Beverages, learned this the hard way: “Don’t just assume your idea is great. Even if your family and friends say so. Get a prototype out into the market. Get people outside of your network to tell you it’s a good idea.” This is particularly crucial in the NZ drinks industry where there are low barriers to entry making it easy to create a drink and bring it to market—but the real challenge is getting the market share.
Consider Blockbuster in 2000. Executives were convinced their business model would never fail—and laughed Netflix’s founders out of the room, ignoring a partnership deal that would have changed everything. They filed for bankruptcy a decade later. Netflix is now worth billions.
Be the Decisions Guy Instead
Imagine if someone had the courage to pause that meeting to ask some constructive questions of the Blockbuster CEO?
In your business, whether you’re the founder or the Managing Director, your job isn’t to have all the answers. It’s to filter and direct the solutions to get the right outcomes. To make sure the right questions are being asked. You’re the master blender, so you taste everything, understand the full palate, know what to keep and what to cut and—crucially—when to stop. And you know who’s palate to trust for feedback. Most importantly, you don’t lone-wolf it.
Umberto Luchini, founder of Wolf Spirit Distillery, nails it: “The most important habits I must maintain are focus, resilience, and flexibility. I must enforce a delicate balance of not changing strategy too often, but being nimble enough to change it when I realise that something is not working out as hoped.”
If survival in the drinks industry was a game, the spoils will always go to the winning strategy, not the strategist. It’s a tough lesson for a strategist to learn, but it changed the course of my career. Ultimately, it rarely matters who comes up with the winning idea because it’s only execution that matters. See? A poor strategy is always blamed, but a good one is rarely praised. Being the ideas guy ain’t so much of a thrill. Trust me, I worked in advertising.
How to Become a Better Decision-Maker
Here’s the uncomfortable bit: founders can be some of the hardest people to tell the truth to, because they’re used to creating their own universe; surrounding themselves who also believe in the cause. Cue scenes from WeWork, The Dropout, The Social Network.. you name it.
If you’re working solo or with only one or two employees who rely on you for their livelihoods, you have yes-people by default. Not because they can’t say no, but because power dynamics are real.
Three practical moves:
Build an advisory board. Not cheerleaders. Find constructive and qualified people who have nothing to lose by telling you no or giving you challenging but constructive feedback. People who’ll look you in the eye and say “show me the data.” They’ll interrogate your business model.
Demand evidence, not enthusiasm. The fix for confirmation bias is straightforward: embrace criticisms and negative information. Use it to make your idea stronger and more likely to succeed. Ask for market validation. Ask for numbers that back up the brilliant hunch. Never rely on a single source of feedback.
Ask the uncomfortable questions.
“What are we missing?”
“What would have to be true for this to work?”
”What would have to be true for this to fail?”
“Where’s the data that says this will work?”
Make these questions routine, not emergency measures. Investigate your own magical thinking.
The liberation here is profound. Less pressure to be brilliant, more space to be effective. You’re not the source of all innovation—you’re the quality control that ensures the best ideas win.
A Boring Strategy Still Beats A Brand-New Idea (Usually)
Here’s the thing about great ideas: most of us don’t have them. And that’s fine. There is only one Taylor Swift. (IYKYK).
Regardless of how good the idea is, you’ll still need to do the work that makes every good idea successful. The hygiene. The COGS management, the marketing investment and finding an audience ready to engage. No revolutionary idea alone can generate revenue. You’ll always have to do the work. Which is why sometimes you don’t need a flashy new idea (did somebody say rebrand?). You need to knuckle down to consistent strategic decisions, methodical improvement, and the discipline to execute what works rather than what feels like the exciting silver bullet. Over time, strategy beats the sizzle of a new idea, because most customers are mainstream and not early adopters.
(Unless, of course, your idea actually is Netflix. Then Netflix wins. Evenutally. So far.)
The exception that proves the rule: if you’ve got the capital to play with and can carry the risk of your good ideas not delivering outcomes, then play all day. Experiment. Follow your instincts. Learn from failure and success. Refine and master your craft. But if the outcomes matter more than how you get there—if cash flow is tight, if margins are razor-thin, if you’re betting the business on this call—then you need strategy based in reality, not ideas that sound good in an echo chamber.
There’s a NZ producer making two products—one costs him $4 a bottle to sell and the other $0.30. He’s still making both because the opportunity cost still outweighs the opportunity investment. But he’s done the work and rationalised the strategy. Simple.
But here’s a critical self-reflection: do you have the clarity to know which role you are fulfilling right now? Are you being the solutions-lead or the strategy mastermind?Because that is exactly the kind of objective assessment that’s impossible when you’re lost in defending your brilliant solution.
Most businesses succeed through relentless execution of sound strategy, not flashes of genius. The best idea in the room should win. Not just yours. That’s not weakness. That’s leadership.
So start being the strategist, pulling together your A-team of advisors and challengers. Because businesses need good decisions more than they need good ideas. And if you can’t tell the difference, you’re already in trouble.
Need Someone to Tell You No?
Look, I’ve just spent 800 words telling you to find people who’ll challenge your ideas. So here’s where I remind you I’m here to help.
I work with drinks business leaders who need objective input—someone who’ll ask the hard questions and demand to see the data or help you find it. No nodding along. Just years of experience helping you sort the good from the great decisions. Available for consulting or as a strategic sounding board. Let’s talk.