May the Best Idea Win
Getting to the best idea or decision means always being willing to confront the brutal reality of the situation.
Matt Hunter • November 18, 2025
One of the defining qualities of great leaders (which we’ve talked about a lot in this newsletter) is their insistence on seeking out the truth, no matter how brutal it is.
Leaders who avoid the brutal facts risk making decisions based on illusions. But those who seek the truth, no matter how hard it is to hear, position themselves and their teams for real, sustainable success.
That’s because the truth reflects the reality of a situation. There are many areas where you can get into trouble by not acknowledging reality. Some of the ones I see the most often are underperforming employees, product-market misalignment, denial of financial health, market shifts or disruption, and customer churn or dissatisfaction. In his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, Jim Collins looks to Winston Churchill’s leadership during World War II as a case study in leading with truth. Aware of the danger of sugar-coated information, Churchill established the “Statistical Office,” a special unit dedicated to feeding him the raw, unfiltered facts about the war effort. No spin, no optimism bias—just the brutal reality. This allowed Churchill to make informed decisions, even when the news was grim (which, often, it was). Churchill’s willingness to confront the truth ultimately strengthened Britain’s resilience during one of its darkest times.
To make good decisions, you need good information. If you’re being fed poor information, your decisions will be poor. It sounds obvious, but most organizations get this wrong. That’s because humans have a deep, hard-wired bias to avoid the cognitive dissonance of anything that conflicts with their established views. If some information conflicts with your perspective or even your desires and expectations for your company, you’re naturally going to want to avoid it.
In practice, staying grounded in the facts is incredibly challenging, especially when the truth is hard to hear. Constantly receiving brutal news doesn’t feel good, and it can wear down even the strongest leader.
This also requires intellectual promiscuity: the willingness to constantly learn, question, and rewrite your assumptions based on new data. You’ve gotta be willing to be wrong. Great leaders don’t cling to outdated beliefs; they adapt and adjust, always seeking to get closer to reality.
One of the best ways to do this is to create a feedback-rich culture. That means having information flowing directly from the source, not just relying on secondhand reports passed up through management layers. Elon Musk and Steve Jobs both mastered this approach, which is now considered a key aspect of "founder mode." Both leaders would talk directly to engineers, designers, and the people closest to the work. It’s not micromanagement, it’s accurate data-gathering.
The Best Idea Wins
In the end, it doesn’t matter who’s right. It’s about getting it right. The best leaders don’t cling to their ideas; they fight for the best idea to rise to the top, even if that means admitting they were wrong. Steve Jobs embodied this mindset when he said, “I don’t mind being wrong. And I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot. It doesn’t really matter to me too much. What matters to me is we do the right thing.”
That kind of humility is what separates great leaders from mediocre ones. Jobs didn’t always have the right answer, but he created an environment where truth could surface. As former Apple and Google exec Kim Scott points out in her book Radical Candor, people said Steve always got it right—not because he was infallible, but because he encouraged his team to challenge him and tell him when he was wrong. That’s how the best ideas emerged and won.
Credibility also plays a critical role in this process. When debating ideas, it’s essential to weigh each person’s expertise and proximity to the problem. Credible people should naturally carry more weight in the discussion. It’s not about titles or hierarchy, it’s about who has the clearest view of the truth.
As the leader, your job is not to have all the right answers but to humble yourself enough to run a process that will reliably surface the best answers. That’s real leadership—not pretending to be the smartest person in the room, but creating the conditions where the best ideas can win. Great leadership is a dance between ontological humility and decisive authority. You need to have the self-awareness to question your own beliefs while also being assertive enough to call the shots when the situation demands it.
This requires vulnerability. You have to be willing to look like an idiot sometimes in the pursuit of the right answer. It means stepping into passionate debates, arguing your point fiercely, and still having the openness to say, “You know what? You’re right. I was wrong.” That’s the price of landing on the right move. Stop trying to protect your ego and focus on serving the mission and making sure the strongest ideas win, no matter where they come from.
Disagree and Commit
One of Amazon’s most famous leadership principles is “Disagree and Commit.” (The rest of the phrase? “Or please resign.”) Bezos placed a high value on healthy dissent. He wanted leaders to fight for what they believed was right—and then, once a decision was made, to fully back it.
Sometimes it’s a small disagreement, like a product design change. You might argue hard for a certain approach, but if the decision goes another way, your job is to put your full weight behind it and make it succeed as if it were your idea. Other times, the stakes are higher. Take Amazon’s practice of “unregretted attrition,” where managers must stack-rank their teams and identify the lowest performers (typically the bottom 5-10%) to let go of. Often, these employees aren’t doing bad work; they’re just not performing at the top. The “unregretted” part refers to the belief that keeping someone who isn’t a top contributor ultimately holds the company back, preventing stronger talent from joining and lowering overall performance.
As a manager, you might passionately argue that everyone on your team is performing at a high level and deserves to stay (in other words, you disagree). But when your leader responds, “I understand, but I still need to know the weakest person on your team,” that’s when the commit part kicks in. You put aside your disagreement and fully back the decision, even if it stings.
Whatever the result of the debate, make sure everyone agrees to get on board with the decision and fully see it through, together.
That’s how the best idea wins.