David Cabero: "Para ser una máquina de decidir, todos deben hablar, analizar y aprender"

Our education is Cartesian, so we think we make decisions with logic, but in reality most decisions are emotional. I call it the 'PEC' - politics, emotions, culture. Politics is when your boss asks your opinion on his book and you say it's great because you want a promotion. Logic plays a very small part. If you ask me for percentages, I'd say almost all decisions are made with emotion.

Experience can be dangerous if you don't theorize it. At BIC Europe, we are growing 10% annually, from 500 million in 2020 to 700 million now, aiming for 1 billion by 2030. We use three strategic levers: channel (focus on e-commerce, which grows 15% and we can grow 30% by investing 20 million euros that competitors can't), product (expanding from stationery to lighters, even though people smoke less, we sell them for barbecues at double the price), and geography (investing in Eastern Europe, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Turkey). We started a transformation in 2019, perhaps late, but we are changing the company.

Culture is the sum of behaviors, values, rituals, communication, and decision-making. To make good decisions, the whole team must speak and contribute collective knowledge. The key link is how we handle failures. If the CEO doesn't admit mistakes in postmortems, the team will only tell half the truth. The CEO must be the curator of culture, leading by example. Best practices should not be a show where people win awards; they should be genuine learning about what worked and why.

There are three types of decisions: strategic, tactical, and operational. The problem is that top management wants to decide everything. Strategy is about where to invest, like e-commerce. Tactical is choosing a specific client like Amazon. Operational is opening 10 SKUs. The key is to clarify who decides what. The person closest to the market knows best. I have 45 countries; I can't know better than the local directors. We help them decide between options, but the decision should be as close to the problem as possible, without exceeding the person's capacity.

I'll give a personal example. At 31 I was CFO in Greece, but they realized I wasn't a good financier, so they made me general manager at 32, five years before the Greek crisis. I decided to close a factory that made stockings. I saw the crisis coming: we had 60% market share, but Italian competitors with huge factories would crush us. So we closed the factory, bought from Italian suppliers, and when the crisis hit, we were fine. It was a hard decision because we had to lay off 85 people, but we managed to relocate 90% of them. This is the concept of 'hard right, easy wrong' from West Point. The easy wrong is to avoid the difficult conversation. The hard right is to do the right thing, even if it's painful. You have to visualize the alternative: if you don't close, the whole company might collapse. And you do it with social responsibility, outplacement, etc.

Economists always say a crisis will come but not the year. Historically, cycles are 7-8 years. Now we have high interest rates to curb inflation. I think we'll have a mild recession soon, then recovery in 2025, but around 2026-2028 we'll have a debt crisis because the world is highly indebted. Interest rates won't go back to zero, so some companies will struggle to pay. When I talk to financiers, they say a debt crisis is coming. We have some margin, but it's coming.

I never make decisions alone, but some cannot be delegated. For me, good leaders have five attributes: 1) Create a vision, 2) Communicate it effectively so people follow, 3) Be able to decide, including hard decisions, 4) Passion for what you do, which can be calm conviction, and 5) Genuine interest in people. If the interest is not genuine, it's better not to show any.

I didn't want problems with my company, so I made sure not to earn anything from the book. All proceeds go to a European association called N Mentora, which helps startups grow and create jobs. The founders then pay it forward by helping others.