No Empire was ever built by a committee

How Consensus Culture is Ruining Art & Business

America used to be a land of builders. A place where a single mind, armed with vision and guts, could carve out something lasting. Steel was laid, cities were raised, fortunes were built, not because someone took a poll, but because someone made a damn decision.

But now? Everything is a meeting. Every move is run through six different approval processes, six different opinions, and six different layers of people whose job is to make sure nobody gets their feelings hurt. And that’s exactly why nothing gets done. Business and art are being strangled to death by consensus culture. We’ve convinced ourselves that leadership is dangerous, that strong decision-making is oppressive, that no one should have the final say. And what’s left? Bland, gutless corporations that bend at the first sign of controversy. Art that plays it safe, afraid to offend, afraid to stand out, afraid to matter. Companies packed with bottlenecks instead of builders. Middle managers who create red tape instead of revenue. You know what kills an empire? Indecision.

Business used to be about building. Now it’s about mitigating risk. Art used to be about pushing boundaries. Now it’s about not offending the algorithm. We’ve convinced ourselves that leadership is dangerous, that decision-making should be softened, that no one should have the final say.

The economy isn’t a shit show because we lack talent. It’s a shit show because we’ve let unproductive people run the show. People who have never built a damn thing in their lives are the ones deciding what gets made, what gets funded, and what’s “appropriate.” And look where that’s gotten us. We used to respect strong leaders and people with vision, people who made the hard calls, people who took the heat and kept moving. Now? We pretend leadership is a group process. That every decision should be open for debate, that no one should be in charge.

We’ve all seen it. The more people are added to the decision-making process, the more bloated an organization (or the government for that matter), the more imminent it’s failure. More time will be spent debating, hearing each other out, and dancing around feelings than getting anything done.

So let me ask you this…how many groundbreaking businesses were built by a show of hands? How many timeless works of art were written by a committee? How many real innovations came from a room full of people who were scared to take a risk? Exactly. The market doesn’t give a damn about your internal approval process. It rewards execution.

You want to know why businesses fail? Because they stop making decisions. They hesitate. They wait for a consensus that never comes. They suffocate under the weight of their own fear. Empires aren’t built by committees. They can’t be. It takes too fucking long. They’re built by risk-takers, by decision-makers, by people who bet on themselves when no one else will. They are the ones who don’t wait for permission. They don’t waste time catering to people who will never create anything. They make a decision, they execute, and they move forward while everyone else is still rewriting the mission statement for the twelfth time.

So ask yourself…are you building, or are you just sitting in another meeting pretending you are?

Elizabeth Duffy