Jim Cook is the full-time founder & CEO of BenchBoard.com, a strategic advisory and executive coaching company. He also writes weekly at Cook’s PlayBooks, a Substack for founders, CEOs, COOs, and CFOs focused on lessons learned from scaling companies from series A to IPO. This article is brought to you in partnership with Brex.

I’ve written extensively about my frameworks for building strong decision-making systems. So when I came across a recent CFO.com article on how Brex’s leadership team connects strategy and compliance — what I often think of as opportunity vs. risk — it inspired me to explore how those same principles can be applied to decision-making at scale.

Brex clearly believes in the importance of roles, controls, data flows, and cross-functional collaboration as essential ingredients for generating company-wide insights and driving better decisions. I want to build on that conversation and recommend a framework for creating a Decision Ownership System:

• ✅ Clearly defined ownership roles
• ✅ Decision guardrails tagged by $, confidence, and risk
• ✅ Decision scorecards for post-decision accountability and course correcting
• ✅ Installing an ownership culture built upon these foundations

As we double-click on this idea, we’ll focus on specific steps the finance team can start implementing today to create a world-class decision-making system. I followed up on this idea with Brex EVP of Finance Erica Dorfman, who’s seen firsthand how different decision structures play out across a career in investment banking, capital markets, and financial tech — and shares why the best teams design systems that break the tradeoff between speed and control.

The evolution of every startup's decision-making

In every great company, decisions start out haphazardly and eventually graduate to how Jeff Bezos built Amazon with higher velocity + higher-quality decisions — or, in Brex verbiage, speed + control. Alternatively, the forensics of almost every failed company shows a decision-making system that never graduated. The best ideas, insights, and financial and operational course-correcting execution never evolved.

In early company stages, there is often confusion about who really owns a decision. Many times, the CEO is simply making all of them. When and how to graduate your decision-making is a delicate, double-edged sword. The secret to your organization's scaling success is to constantly sharpen both sides of this decision sword.

More on speed:

In Brex’s 2025 CFO Survey:

“In this environment, speed is no longer a differentiator. It’s a requirement for survival.”

While speed from finance is almost always highly aligned with the rest of the company, our job as finance leaders is to influence the minimum viable control requirements, combined with speed. From there, we need to influence and evolve the organization into higher transparency of the decisions with a focus on making higher-quality decisions.

This control, on the other hand, is the highest source of resistance inside a company. Most controls are still viewed as slow, risk-averse, and misaligned with the rest of the company. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

One approach is to break down the pros and cons of centralized vs decentralized decision-making.

Decentralization

Too much decentralization leads to a lack of clear ownership and accountability, devolves into siloed teams, and involves a whole lot of finger-pointing. Decentralization is often promoted as “autonomy,” but it can lead to poor company execution, customer dissatisfaction, product delays, and very costly mistakes. 

Centralization

Too much decision centralization, where all decisions need to come from the CEO or CFO, leads to the opposite. Decision speed slows to a crawl. Reducing risk and hoping to “not get fired” becomes company culture, and proper risk/opportunity, innovation, and a culture of true company leadership never get built.

The problem with most arguments is their binary nature. Either / Or. The best solutions are nearly always Both / And. Erica says that’s how you keep business momentum:

“The old model of centralized control and rigid planning simply doesn't work for fast, high-performing teams. The future of operating is through empowerment of teams with thoughtful decentralization, constant recalibration, and real-time financial intelligence.”

So let’s design decision systems with the proper balance of speed + control that scales properly.

How to structure for scale & flexibility

1. Start centralized: Build early, simple, centralized systems and establish the proper minimum level of controls that still enable speed.
2. Design the system for future decentralization. Create decision roles, financial guardrails, and finance + department joint dual decisions. For example: Finance business partners dual-reporting to key executive department leaders.
3. Define department leader ownership rules and roles with guardrails and KPIs.
4. Evolve into a hybrid model — centralized + decentralized. Centralized on decision-making strategy; decentralized on decision execution. You also want to separate “innovation decisions” and “core operating decisions.”

A CFO playbook for decision ownership

Here’s how to structure a repeatable system for decision clarity, accountability, and scalability:

Step 1: Define decision tiers by risk & dollar impact

Create a simple 2x2 matrix of $ vs Risk/Opportunities

• X-axis: Dollar size of decision
• Y-axis: Risk or Opportunity Score (using the prior Risk Equation: Probability x Severity chart below and adjust your red/yellow/green risk gates accordingly.

RISK = Probability x Severity

Here’s a simpler framework for risk-based decision-making.

Rule of thumb: Set your thresholds accordingly.

Step 2: Assign clear decision owners + decision teams

Every key decision must have:

• An executive owner (e.g., the VP Sales or CPO)
• A finance partner (aligned by function); sometimes it is the CFO for higher-risk/-opportunity decisions
• An internal department champion of the decision (the executive team leader can’t ultimately own every high-risk/high-opportunity decision)
• A “decision type” tag (e.g., strategic bet, vendor contract, new hire class, new market)

As the CFO and finance team architect, your role is to become the expert designer and orchestra conductor of this decision-making system.

Step 3: Tag assumptions with confidence and risk scores

Borrow from my Decision-Making Series.

Label each key assumption as:

• Data-backed
• Opinion-based
• Confidence score (1-10)
• Risk score (Prob % x Severity %)

This builds a pre-mortem decision score and creates faster-twitch decision muscles while setting everyone up for course-correcting post-mortem decision analyses.

Step 4: Scorecard the decision post-mortem

Every significant decision should have a built-in feedback loop:

• Did it meet the expected ROI or definitions of success?
• What lagging/leading metrics support success/failure?
• What should we do differently now?

Knowing full well there are no perfect decisions, each one carries the opportunity to invest further or improve over time. It also comes with the responsibility to significantly adjust or course-correct if it fails to meet its pre-established success metrics.

“Decision feedback loops are the single biggest driver of growth because they compound, helping the whole organization learn how to improve,” Erica adds. “We can’t measure every decision perfectly, but we can always test our assumptions, inputs, and expected outcomes.

Pro tip: Create a “Decision Hall of Fame” and a “Decision Graveyard.” (“Hall of Shame” is likely too harsh a concept) to harvest lessons from both success and failure.

Step 5: Co-pilot, not cop

The goal isn’t to centralize power in finance. The goal is to be the organization's co-pilot and to integrate financial discipline at the point of financial decisions. According to Brex’s 2025 CFO Survey, the No. 1 area CFOs want more impact in is strategic decision-making. The biggest blocker to this is unclear ownership.

Solve for that by giving:

• Finance visibility early
• Executive teams clear swim lanes
• An approval system that signals green lights at low levels, yellow lights for approval decisions requiring cross-functional collaboration, and red stop lights for escalating the highest stakes decisions to the executive team.

Step 6: Fully embrace “bet-based decision-making”

Steal a page from professional poker player Annie Duke: Thinking in bets and storytelling how the best business decisions are probability-based requires you to separate the actual decision from the actual outcome:

• Was it a good decision, but unlucky (bad) outcome?
• Or a bad decision with a lucky (good) outcome?

Scaling decision maturity

I would like to make what may be a controversial historical statement, but what I believe is a requirement for the next era of financial leaders:

CFOs should architect joint approval and ownership at the right risk/reward level of the business. CFOs need to be the new architects of the decision-making system itself.

Erica puts this into context: “A CFO’s real leverage is in designing a system where the right people can move fast with the right guardrails. When finance builds that architecture, the organization stops waiting on approvals and starts focusing on growth. That’s how CFOs give the company back its most valuable resource: time.”

You know you are building the decision-making system right when:

• The decision “whys” are clear and transparent.
• Course-correcting future decisions are pre-wired.
• Decision ownership is happening faster with more control lower and lower in the organizations.

Here’s a great quote on this subject:

“The best decisions are made by those closest to the problem with support from those closest to the consequences.” — General Stanley McChrystal

1. Define delegated decisions
2. Define partnered decisions
3. Define escalated decisions (requiring CFO and/or CEO and/or Board)

Customize by stage: For early-stage companies, your “high risk” bar might be $50K. For late-stage, it may be $1M+. Align thresholds to burn rate and strategic runway.

Cook’s playbook: Decision scorecard template

Every decision over the sign-off threshold should include a short-form Decision Scorecard that documents the assumptions behind the decision. The best companies capture these assumptions upfront and grade the decisions vs the outcome after the fact.

This becomes your permanent audit trail. It’s ideal for board transparency, post-mortems, and performance reviews.

Final say: Your job is to model how to make quality decisions, not just fast decisions.

When the right decision systems are in place, execs start owning and improving their own decisions over time, requiring fewer and fewer escalated decisions to the CEO, CFO, or head of finance.

When to say “no” as CFO

“The job of the CFO is to help the company build and execute on its strategy — you can't do that by saying no to everything,” Erica says. “The best version of this role and of a finance team is to partner to ensure goals and priorities are understood, and to help teams execute on them."

So when should you say “no?” Use this quick checklist:

🚩 The decision skips alternatives

🚩 There’s no model, just narrative

🚩 Confidence score <6 and no mitigation

🚩 There are no clear success and failure metrics or data-driven milestones to evaluate the decision.

🚩 It exposes mission-critical risk (security, compliance, cash runway)

When these appear, the CFO is required to push back while also offering a staging/gating of the decision as a less risky path to “Yes.” It’s how the best leaders transition from a No CFO to a Grow CFO.

Cook’s playbook: Create a quarterly “Decision Review” session

Just like a forecast update or QBR, create a quarterly session with:

• Top-5 highest-dollar decisions last quarter
• Scorecard the decisions vs. the outcomes
• Forensically evaluate the assumptions
• Memorializing what we learned and what we missed
• Define how and when the course-correcting decision will be made

Over time, this turns decision-making into a cultural discipline and diminishes the seat-of-the-pants guessing game. It turns every decision into a data set that can be learned from and improved upon.

Companies that scale quickly and control with both velocity and discipline aren’t making better decisions by luck. The best organizations install clear decision-making systems that scale with the business and build a decision culture around transparency, risk, and confidence scoring, and ownership and accountability into every decision at all levels of the organization.

“Most companies respond to scale by centralizing decisions to avoid losing control and visibility, but that trade-off slows the fast-moving operations that fueled their growth. The real unlock is building frameworks with guardrails, feedback loops, and real-time financial intelligence. High performance comes from focusing on what matters and giving teams the time and feedback to learn, iterate, and build, without ever having to compromise control.” — Erica Dorfman, SVP of Finance, Brex

Yes, as CFO or head of finance, you need to lead this charge since you sit at the unique intersection of the business where all decisions and their resulting activities show up on the scoreboard.

You aren’t just the system's designer. You’re its architect and coach.

Jim Cook was Intuit’s first head of finance and helped lead their IPO (1993), multiple M&A’s, and scaled their finance teams and systems to a +$4B valuation. He was a founding team member of Netflix, designing all finance and operational functions of the DVD envelope era. Jim also served as CFO of Mozilla. With its 2004 Firefox launch with $2M nonprofit funding to over $500M revenue and cash balance, the Mozilla team re-created the browser market and the subsequent browser wars. During his 30-year career in Silicon Valley, Jim has served as advisor to founders, CEOs, and boards and remains extremely active advising the new finance leadership stack of companies at the forefront of our future — including Brex.