Why They Decide Without You

See the whole business, and the big decisions start coming to you.

In 2004, in my last stretch at Morgan Stanley, the firm handed me an assignment that pulled me clean out of my own patch. After nearly six years of my pitching, it finally decided it wanted its first offshore center, a single site in Mumbai that would - eventually - carry work for desks across the whole company.

I picked four people I trusted to work with me. We had nine months. In a time shorter than that, we opened a center that already had 400 in a 1,500-capacity brand new building , the first wave of the firm’s offshoring, and I picked up the Global Offshore Strategy job along with it.

What made that work was not the title. It was that I could hold the whole firm “in my head” at once, well past my own ‘desk’ or any single business line: the cost base of the entire company, the business units that would resist the change, the clients who could not know their work had moved an ocean away and the careers of four hundred people who were not yet on our global payroll. I was thinking about the enterprise, because for once, my job was the enterprise.

The leaders I coach are rewarded for the opposite

The senior people I work with, primarily at IT services and technology consulting firms, spend most of their careers being paid to own one thing well, a single account or region. They protect their number and hit their target, looking after their own people as they go. That is how you get promoted for a decade or two. Then they reach the level where the firm needs them to think about the firm, and the very habit that built their career starts to work against them.

There are two ways to sit in a senior seat. One leader asks what is best for their piece of the business. The kind the firm comes to rely on asks what is best for the business as a whole, then carries their own piece toward it, even when the local cost stings. Clients feel that difference, and so does the CEO. The leader who thinks that way, gets handed the problems that cross every boundary, because they are the only one who can see across all of them.

I watch this play out in a familiar way. A delivery head runs a near-flawless account and cannot understand why the firm keeps elevating a peer whose numbers are smaller. The peer keeps making calls that help the company even when they dent his own margin, and leadership has started to trust him with decisions that span the business. The delivery head is plenty capable. He is simply playing a smaller game than his seat now asks for, and he may be the last to notice.

In 2026 the gap shows faster

The decisions your clients are making about AI do not sit inside one function. They cut across delivery, sales, security and the P&L at the same time. A leader who can only speak for their own tower has little to say about a choice that touches all of them. The leader who can reason across the whole business is the one the client wants at the table when next year’s budget gets set.

This is where knowing your own defaults matters. Most senior leaders have never asked themselves whether they think like an owner of the enterprise or a steward of their corner. It comes down to one habit: which question you reach for first when a hard call lands on your desk.

One honest test

Look at your last three big decisions. For each one, ask whether you optimized for your part of the business or for the whole of it. A leader thinking at the enterprise level can name at least one recent call that cost their own team something so the firm came out ahead. If every decision happened to favor your patch, the account habit may still be running you, and your CEO can probably see it before you can.

The good news is that this can be learned, and it does not take a new personality. In 2004 I was the same soft-spoken person I had always been. What changed was the size of the picture I was willing to hold, and the willingness to spend some of “my own capital” for a result that belonged to everyone.

Seeing only your corner can cap you right where you are.

Where to look next

If you want an honest read on where you stand, in yourself or across your leadership team, start with taking the Leadership Bottleneck Diagnostic. Three minutes, three dimensions, enterprise thinking among them.

It asks the questions your quarterly review skips.

Raju Panjwani
Founder of Live Masterminds | Former Managing Director at Morgan Stanley.
He works with senior leaders in IT services and technology consulting, helping them see themselves more clearly and lead through what comes next.