it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission

Managing to the Lowest Common Denominator: How Companies Kill Their Own Success

Over the years, I’ve noticed something that repeats everywhere — in business, in society, and even in schools — and I saw it up close in my own career. When a system grows, it tends to shift its focus from excellence to control. From winning to managing. From raising people up to lowering standards so everyone can fit. But nowhere is this more obvious, and more damaging, than in business.

When a store or a district is small and scrappy, everything feels alive. Managers make decisions quickly. Creativity is encouraged. Strong leaders run their stores the way great captains run a ship — with ownership, instincts, accountability, and pride. That’s why the “small stage” is often where the biggest growth happens. Everyone is close to the customer. Everyone cares. Everyone feels the impact of their decisions right away.

But as a company grows, something shifts. Headquarters grows even faster. Policies multiply. Procedures multiply. Reports multiply. And suddenly, the strong stores — the ones that built the company — are forced to slow down so the weaker stores can keep up.

This is where the trouble starts.

I watched it happen at Clover. I watched it happen at Kohl’s. And I’ve watched it happen to more companies than I can count. Instead of holding the weaker stores to the standard of the strong ones, corporate does the opposite. They create policies based on the lowest-performing stores. They take away the freedom of the best managers because the worst managers “can’t handle it.” They water everything down to the lowest common denominator. It’s the same thing you see when schools lower academic standards so everyone passes. The whole system gets weaker. Nobody wins.

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is assuming success can be copied through a checklist. When they see a top-performing location, they rush in and say, “What is this store doing? What routines do they follow? What’s their recovery method? What’s their communication flow?” They try to extract the “best practices,” bottle them up, and ship them out to everyone else.

They completely miss the point.

The reason that top store is winning has very little to do with how they fold shirts, how they schedule breaks, or how they merchandise a gondola. It’s winning because the manager is a great leader. And a great leader will succeed with any system. They don’t win because of the policies—they win in spite of them.

I can tell you this from first-hand experience.

When I was in store management, I was always pushing the line. I wasn’t reckless, and I wasn’t disrespecting the company, but I wasn’t a robot either. If I found a faster way to get something done, I did it. If something saved payroll, I cut the corner. If an employee had a new idea that made sense, I tried it. If a rule slowed me down and didn’t affect the customer, I bent it. My job was to run a great store, not to worship a binder.

And I’ll be honest — I lived by a little saying most true leaders understand: it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission. Not because I wanted to break rules, but because I refused to let bureaucracy slow down results. I’d rather move fast, produce excellence, and explain it later if needed than sit around waiting for someone at a desk to approve common sense.

This used to get me in trouble. District managers love a good policy book.

More than once, one of my bosses would pull me aside after hearing about something I did and say, “Listen, Rich… we don’t have a hundred Rich’s out there. That’s why we have policies and procedures everyone can follow.”

And every time, I’d say the same thing: “It’s your job to find or develop a hundred Rich’s, not mine. My job is to run this store.”

That’s the whole problem right there.

It’s easier for corporate to control weak managers through policies than it is to develop them into strong managers. Policies are the lazy solution. Development is the real work. A company becomes great when it raises people up, not when it chains everyone down so mediocrity can survive.

In the corporate world, this mistake has a name: managing to the lowest common denominator. It’s what happens when a company is more worried about keeping the weakest performers afloat than letting the best performers soar. It’s how bureaucracy gets built. It’s how innovation dies. And it’s why once-great companies decline while pretending everything is “aligned” and “standardized.”

When a company loses sight of the fact that people—not policies—drive success, the entire business begins to drift. You can see the same pattern that brought down entire societies when they tried to centrally control everything, or schools when they lowered their academic standards. The more you try to make everything equal from the top down, the more you actually destroy excellence from the inside out.

In my own leadership career, I always focused on developing people, not policing them. I didn’t want carbon copies; I wanted high performers. I wasn’t interested in “compliance”—I was interested in results. And I firmly believed that you raise the whole organization by raising its leaders, not by lowering the bar so everyone can step over it without effort.

If there’s one thing I learned after decades in retail, it’s this:
Great managers don’t need a policy book. Weak managers won’t read it anyway.

But find—or develop—one hundred truly great managers, and you won’t need half the rules you have today.

That’s the difference between a company that grows… and a company that eventually collapses under the weight of its own bureaucracy.