Leadership Quote by Lee Iacocca

Decisiveness, in Iacocca's world, isn’t a personality quirk; it’s an operating system. Coming out of mid-century American industry and into the crucible of Chrysler’s near-collapse, he learned that a manager isn’t paid for tasteful deliberation. They’re paid to end uncertainty. The line compresses a whole corporate ethic into a single blunt metric: the job is to choose, commit, and move.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to two familiar managerial pathologies: the committee that turns responsibility into fog, and the “strategic” leader who treats indecision as sophistication. Iacocca’s praise of decisiveness is also a power claim. To decide is to own the consequences; to hesitate is to distribute risk to everyone else while keeping your hands clean. That’s why the word lands with such macho, industrial-era confidence. It’s less self-help than command-and-control realism.

What makes the line work rhetorically is its deliberate oversimplification. “One word” is managerial theater: a tidy formula you can repeat in a boardroom, a keynote, a crisis meeting. It flatters the listener with clarity while smuggling in a worldview where speed and authority outrank nuance. Even the spareness of the phrasing performs the virtue it endorses: no caveats, no footnotes, just a call to act.

Of course, decisiveness without judgment is just faster failure. Iacocca doesn’t deny that; he’s betting that in real organizations, the scarcer resource isn’t information. It’s the nerve to choose.