Review: "How Fast-Growing Companies Can Make Better Decisions" by Harvard Business Review
- Jun 14
- 2 min read
You know that scene in every startup movie where the founder is standing in the middle of a chaotic office, phones ringing, people running past, and they just look completely lost? Tatiana Sandino, a professor at Harvard Business School, has basically written the manual for avoiding that moment.
And the thing is, she does not start with a solution. She starts with something far more useful. She starts with the uncomfortable truth that most growing companies fall apart along exactly the same cracks every single time. Alignment goes first. Then operational complexity piles on. Then financial discipline quietly slips. Then oversight disappears entirely. It is almost predictable, which makes it almost preventable.
Here is where it gets genuinely interesting. Most leaders facing this chaos reach for one of two levers. Either they pull everything back to the centre and start approving every decision themselves, or they push authority down and hope people figure it out. Sandino argues, quite convincingly, that both of these instincts are wrong. Centralise too much and you strangle the speed that made your company worth building in the first place. Decentralise too freely and you end up with twelve different teams doing twelve different things with nobody accountable for any of them.
The third path she calls structured empowerment and honestly the name does not do it justice. The idea is elegant. Leaders define a small set of well-designed options, drawn from what actually works, and then let frontline people choose the option that fits their situation best. You are not telling people what to do. You are telling people what good looks like and trusting them to pick their way there. Accountability shifts from following a process to delivering a result.
That shift sounds small. It is not. Anyone who has managed a team at scale will feel it immediately.
The part that lingers after you finish reading is the fault line framework. Alignment, operational complexity, financial discipline, oversight. Once you see those four pressure points named so clearly you start spotting them everywhere, in companies you work for, companies you admire, companies you have read about falling apart in the news. It is the kind of framework that changes how you see things permanently.
The only thing you wish for is more examples. The concept is strong enough that a few vivid case studies would have made this exceptional rather than just very good.
Verdict: Read this before your company hits the breaking point, not after. Sandino has written something that is rare in business literature. A practical framework that also happens to be genuinely enjoyable to think through.
Credit & Disclaimer: This review is based on my personal understanding (may be right or may be wrong) of "How Fast-Growing Companies Can Make Better Decisions" originally published at Harvard Business Review (hbr.org). This review is shared for knowledge sharing and educational purposes only. No ownership of the original content is claimed. Readers are encouraged to visit the original article for the full perspective and please pardon me if I have misunderstood any perspective.
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