Fail Fast Leadership based on our work with Irad Eichler, CEO at Circles

Many CEOs hit a growth ceiling because every decision, approval, and correction still routes through them.

As a bestselling author featured on BBC TV and in Times Square and having collaborated with 60+ CEOs, in the next 60 seconds I’ll help you decide when empowering managers to fail fast accelerates scale more than hands-on mentoring ever could. This is based on our work with Irad Eichler, CEO at Circles.

When companies cross $1M in revenue, leadership leverage matters more than leadership control. In our work with Irad, we see that empowering managers to fail fast creates faster learning loops, stronger ownership, and fewer bottlenecks at the top. The goal is not chaos. The goal is calibrated learning.

This mirrors a lesson I share in my bestselling book Product Marketing Wisdom. Metrics without context are noise. Leadership without context is the same. Just as benchmarking only works when compared against the right peers, empowerment only works when managers have clear goals, fast feedback, and permission to iterate. When leaders combine trust with clear guardrails, teams learn faster than any top-down mentoring model can deliver.

Fail fast cultures scale because insight compounds across the organization, not just in the CEO’s head.

I dive deeper into this concept of contextual decision-making on page 154 of my book Product Marketing Wisdom, which just completed 57 weeks on the Amazon bestseller list.