Decisiveness isn't a skill

A WeChat piece going around Chinese consulting circles, 《咨询顾问的核心竞争力，从“好品味”走向“能决断”》, makes a clean argument. Tools can teach you taste now, it says, so the scarce person is the one who’ll make the call and put their name on it. Taste is the radar. Decisiveness is pressing the button.

I agree with the direction. Its own examples — knowing which analysis this board cares about, spotting the recommendation that’s dead on arrival, knowing which slide to cut — all read a standard that already exists. That’s judgment, as I’ve argued elsewhere, not taste: taste is a bet on a standard that hasn’t formed yet, with no wrong answer at the moment you make it. That category never shows up in the piece. Not a disagreement. A missing slot.

”Decisiveness” is two things wearing one word

One is saying the sentence. Here’s the path we recommend. The other is carrying what comes after it: your name, your reputation, your next review.

A model can already write the first one. It’ll never supply the second, and not because of anything about intelligence. It has nothing to lose.

So the arc isn’t taste to decisiveness. It’s capability to accountability.

Which makes it a pricing problem

The piece treats the willingness to decide as a personal quality: some people have the nerve, most don’t. I think most of what it’s describing is the payoff structure. Get it right and it was obvious. Get it wrong and you own it for years. Under that asymmetry the rational move is advice that can’t be wrong and can’t change anything. The piece names this exact failure in its own section on firm culture, but files it under culture instead of incentives.

If the shortage is incentives and not nerve, courage training is the wrong medicine. The medicine is a contract. Outcome underwriting is already that at the firm level. I haven’t found a public individual-level equivalent.

What would settle it

Watch whether outcome-linked pay reaches individuals. The public number I can point to is a firm number. I cited it in consulting-outcomes: McKinsey’s Bob Sternfels told HBR that about a third of revenues are underwriting outcomes. That’s the firm’s revenue at risk, not evidence that any partner’s own pay rides on a particular call. If by 2028 a meaningful share of a senior consultant’s personal pay rides on a call they made themselves, that would support the pricing thesis. If I still can’t find that individual link and people under similar incentives consistently differ in who is willing to sign, the original piece is closer to right: nerve matters more than this argument allows.

The honest counterpoint: two people under identical incentives don’t behave the same, and I can’t explain that gap away. Neither can I account for the person who signs their name when nothing rewards it. They exist. They’re probably the one both of us are actually writing about.