Make bold moves early & often can transform your organization.
Every CEO fears making a wrong decision. As the captain of your organization, the weight of responsibility often pushes leaders toward caution. However, great CEOs know that playing it safe rarely leads to extraordinary success. Instead, they embrace a bold, proactive mindset to drive growth and innovation.
Before deciding or making any decision, having substantial information is necessary. The catch is that if you wait until you have all the data you need to pull the trigger on something, you’ve likely lost any speed advantage you could have earned over your competition. Worse, your competitor might have made the bold move already—which now means you’re playing from behind.
Fortune Favors the Bold
A study shared in CEO Excellence by McKinsey Partners, analyzing 2,400 public company CEOs, reveals a key insight: the most successful CEOs make significant decisions early and often in their tenure. These “bold moves,” impacting up to 50% of their business, create a compounding growth effect over time. In contrast, average CEOs opt for smaller-scale changes, only affecting about 5% of their operations.
If you wait too long to act, your competitors may already have the advantage, leaving you to play catch-up. So, how do you lead boldly while mitigating risks?
Scale Matters (Go Big Early)
The bolder moves you make more frequently early in a company’s growth trajectory, the more impact you can have over the long run—which is why this advice is so critical for the leaders of startups and fast-growth companies.
Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions
- Reversible Decisions: If a decision can be undone or adjusted, act quickly. If things don’t work out, you can back out of the move. Bold experimentation, in these cases, often brings unexpected benefits without long-term risk.
- Irreversible Decisions: When a decision is irreversible, take calculated risks. Test your strategy and validate assumptions, but don’t wait too long—delays can erode your competitive edge.
Thinking like this is part of adaptive strategy execution, which comes from agile thinking. It allows us to constantly move and test our strategy instead of setting a rigid plan for the next three years. You can’t always afford to wait for things to play out the way you hope they will, which is why it often pays to be bolder than you ever thought possible.
Go Big or Go Home | Case Studies of Bold Leadership in Action
- Shift from Travel to Consulting
One example was a company that operated in the premium travel sector. Their customers hired them to run sales conventions or partnership meetings. It was a premium market niche, and they delivered a high level of service to their clients. The company also started a successful side business offering consulting services to its client base around strategy and product development. But the company’s bread and butter, and where most employees worked, was still the travel business.
Over time, especially in the wake of the pandemic and more remote work, the CEO of the business saw demand for their services begin to ebb in a big way. The travel business had also become a no-profit zone. So, he boldly shut down the travel business and committed the company’s future to its consulting business.
That bold move had serious consequences: the CEO had to lay many people off. But the result is that he is now running a highly profitable and growing business.
- Embracing Competitors’ Technology
Another client I saw make a bold move was the CEO of a business that analyzed customer experiences. They had built the company around a set of proprietary online survey tools they had developed. The idea was that customers hired them to explore what their customers thought of them. It was a fast-growth and profitable business—until several other software companies entered the space, offering highly competitive survey tools. It soon became clear to this CEO that his company couldn’t compete based on their survey tools. So, he made a bold move. He shut them down and instead moved to license the better tools from one of his former competitors. The CEO decided that the business they were really in was serving as a trusted partner who provided insights to their customers—not just a survey tool company.
Creating Your Fate
Making bold moves early and often isn’t just about reacting to market trends—it’s about shaping your organization’s destiny. By taking proactive steps, CEOs can set their businesses on a path to sustained growth, outpacing competitors who hesitate.
Action Steps for CEOs:
- Regularly evaluate opportunities for transformative decisions.
- Embrace adaptive strategy execution to remain agile.
- Make bold, calculated moves—especially in areas with high growth potential.
The data is clear: great leaders don’t leave their futures to chance. They beat fate by creating their own success. Are you ready to take your business to the next level?
