What Leaders Get Wrong About Decision Rights

Research by Greer, Jordan, and Sytch reveals that most organizations misconfigure decision rights by confusing authority with accountability, leaving critical choices either bottlenecked or ungoverned. The authors argue that boards and CEOs must redesign decision architectures—clarifying who owns outcomes, not just who approves actions—to accelerate execution without sacrificing oversight. For SEA mid-market boards, this is a direct prescription for resolving the founder-control versus governance-structure tension as companies scale.