Your Board has a vote to grow. It has no vote to shrink

Your Board has a vote to grow. It has no vote to shrink.

Every growth agenda has a ritual. Retrenchment has none, and it happens without minutes.

I made one of those decisions in 2024. I will not say in which company.

The mechanism repeats itself. The table approves growth unanimously. Then the opposite signal arrives: defaults rising, cash stretched, debt maturing before revenue comes in. Nobody proposes shrinking, because that means signing off on a smaller number in a country that only knows how to ask how much it will grow. Then someone acts. If it works, the result belongs to the Board. If it fails, the name on it belongs to whoever acted.

The table did not reject the retrenchment. It never had anywhere to vote on it.

A table that only deliberates growth hands the company's most expensive decision to a single person.

Acting alone kept the company alive and fixed nothing. The ritual still did not exist, and the next person who sees it first does the same math I did: proposing costs your name, acting costs your name, staying quiet costs nothing.

Retrenchment never gets on the agenda by itself. It gets there when cash forces it, and by then nobody chooses the size.

At the next meeting, ask which trigger forces the table to discuss shrinking. Without an answer, the decision is delegated to whoever acts alone, and the bill goes in his name.