Twenty Years at ALDI Ruined My Tolerance for Most Corporate Advice

There was never room for any of that at ALDI, where we had four people doing the work of twelve and made decisions in hours rather than weeks, with everything stripped back to the customer, the numbers and the execution. No endless decks, and no pretending that complexity was the same thing as strategy.

That environment taught me four things I've never since had reason to revise.

The first is that speed beats perfection, because a good decision on Tuesday is worth more than a perfect one three weeks later, and those three weeks cost you something real even though the cost never appears on any report.

The second is that most decisions are reversible, so you may as well make them and move on. The small number that genuinely aren't reversible deserve every bit of care you can give them, which is precisely why you shouldn't be spending that care on the ones that are.

The third is that clarity is a competitive advantage rather than a communication style, and businesses that are clear will consistently outrun businesses that are clever.

The fourth is the one I still use most often, which is that if you can't explain your strategy in three sentences you don't have a strategy. You have a document.

I want to be careful here, because this could easily read as a complaint about language and it isn't. The language is only ever a symptom, and what it tends to be a symptom of is one of three things.

Sometimes it's fear of accountability, because a decision that's never formally made is a decision nobody formally owns, and there's nothing to answer for later. Sometimes it's confusion dressed up as collaboration, where getting more people into the room feels like rigour when it's really the diffusion of a call somebody senior would rather not make on their own. And sometimes it's busy work presented as progress, where the deck gets built, the workshop gets run and the meeting recurs in everybody's calendar while every person involved works genuinely hard and nothing whatsoever moves.

I've watched capable people get buried under processes that served nobody, and I've sat in rooms where everyone nodded along to advice that sounded intelligent and changed absolutely nothing.

This is the point where it stops being an observation about businesses in general and becomes a question about you, because two of the five things a senior leader is always setting show up directly in it.

The first is Decisions, and the question underneath it is: what still reaches me that shouldn't? Every decision that lands on your desk unnecessarily slows your team down twice over, once while it waits for you, and once because the person who should have made it never got the chance to.

The second is Pace, where the question is: what pressure am I transmitting? A leader who's visibly frustrated by delay tends to get speed from the people around them, whereas a leader who's visibly frustrated by mistakes gets caution instead, and caution turns into more meetings, which in turn turns into more careful language. The way your team talks to you is very often your own risk tolerance reflected back at you.

Most leaders never chose either of those deliberately. They inherited them from the first good boss they had, or the first bad one, or from whatever happened to get rewarded in the year they were promoted, and none of that is a criticism because it's how almost everyone ends up leading.

It's also why asking people to drop the jargon so rarely works. The words were never the problem, and changing them does nothing at all to the setting that produced them

None of these needs anybody's permission.

Write your strategy in three sentences, not the deck version but the version you'd say out loud to a new starter in the lift. If you can't do it, that's great to know and fix first.

Look back at your last ten decisions, mark the ones that shouldn't have reached you, and then ask yourself honestly why they did. It usually comes down to one of two answers, which are that the person below you isn't clear they have the call, or that they're perfectly clear and don't trust you to back them if it goes wrong.

And the next time you hear one of those ‘corporate language’ phrases in a meeting, resist the urge to correct it and ask instead, plainly and with no edge in your voice, what decision are we actually avoiding here. Asked well, it's the most useful question available to you in most meetings.

I've made all of this sound rather simpler than it is, because some complexity is genuinely real, and some decisions really do need more people, more time and more thought before anybody commits to them. The skill lies in telling those apart from the ones that are merely uncomfortable, and if you're honest with yourself you can usually feel the difference some time before you can articulate it.

The tightening in your jaw when somebody says "let's socialise this" is data worth trusting