The Discipline of Taking Decisive Actions

Indecision doesn’t just slow a business down, it quietly trains your team to doubt, delay, and drift. We’re talking about the leadership trait that separates an average leader from a transformational leader: taking decisive action. Using James 1:8, we unpack why double-mindedness creates instability and how clarity restores strength when the stakes are high. 

We walk through vivid biblical leadership moments where history turns on a choice: Joshua’s call to choose, David stepping forward while others stall, Esther risking comfort to save a nation, and Saul losing a kingdom through partial obedience. Then we bring it straight into modern business leadership with real examples of what hesitation costs. Kodak had digital photography in 1975 but protected the present and lost the future. Blockbuster had a chance to buy Netflix and didn’t move. These stories aren’t trivia, they’re warnings about market disruption, organizational culture decay, and the price of delay. 

You’ll also get a simple, repeatable decision making process grounded in Christian leadership: seek God first, gather accurate data, clarify the core issue, count the cost, then decide and declare with confidence. We talk about why leaders freeze (loss aversion, fear of criticism, ego risk) and how to communicate decisive moves with vision so people understand the “why” and unity can follow. 

Grab the free 12-page workbook at ChristianBusinessConcepts.org, then listen and put one delayed decision on the table this week. If this helps you lead with courage, subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review. What’s the decision you know you need to make?

Transcript

Welcome, Growth Ask, And Namibia Shoutout

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Thanks, Kelly, and welcome everyone to another episode of the Christian Business Concepts Podcast. I'm your host, Harold Milby, and whether this is your first time listening or you're one of our faithful listeners who listen every week from across the country and around the world, I'm grateful that you're here today. You know, each week we take powerful biblical principles and we try to apply them to business concepts to help Christian business owners and leaders experience what we like to term as true godly success. Not the world's success, but the godly success, which is greater than the world's success. Now, as I say every week, be sure to help us to grow the CBC family by sharing this podcast with four to five other people that you know who you think would appreciate what you've heard. You can you can also help us by making a post on your your Facebook or LinkedIn pages that include your thoughts about the podcast and a link to the podcast. So thanks to all of you who do everything you can to help us to grow. And they the uh CBC podcast continues to grow every month. And so we are so thankful for that. Now, this week I want to give a big shout out to the city of Winhoek, uh, which is in the which is the capital in the in the largest city of the country of Nabimbi. Or uh, I'm sorry, I said that wrong. Nambimbia. Uh Nabimbia. Um excuse me, I am butchering this name and I apologize. Uh Namibia. Namibia. And uh for those of you that don't know this country, uh, I didn't, I had to look it up, but this is a country of godly people, and there's some Christian people there in business, and they are starting to download the podcast there in this country. Uh so Namibia, we appreciate you. We appreciate the uh the folks there in your capital, and uh we hope that this podcast is a blessing to you as well as to everyone. So forgive me for making a mistake in how pronunciated uh the country's name. I apologize, I meant no disrespect whatsoever. Now, thanks to all of you who've downloaded and listened to this podcast before, we appreciate that. And today we're gonna be talking about something that I think separates the average leader from what I would call a transformational leader. Okay. And there's a difference between just a leader and a transformational leader. A transformational leader says exactly it means exactly that they transform the business, they may transform an entire industry, they may transform their people's lives. Uh, but it's important to understand that there's a difference between a leader and a transformational leader. And uh, and we're gonna talk about this item uh that I mentioned in last week's

Why Decisive Action Marks Leaders

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episode. Actually, uh I mentioned this, but a transformational leader knows how to take decisive action. And that's what we're gonna talk about today. Not just action, but decisive action. And there's a difference. Now, by the way, you can go to the CP CBC website at Christian Business Concepts.org and you can download a free 12-page workbook and checklist that goes with today's podcast. So you don't want to just absorb the information, you want to implement it in order for it to be transformational for you and your leadership. Uh, so that's important. So you can go to Christian Business Concepts.org and go to the resources tab and you can find uh the the uh workbook, the 12-page workbook that goes with this podcast. All right. So let's talk about the foundational scripture first. It says James 1 and 8, it says this. It says, a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. See, instability is not incompetence. A lot of times it's just the fact that there's indecision. And that's what James 1 and 8 is talking about. In that passage, it has asked, it said, if any man lack wisdom, let it let him ask of God who giveth liberally and upbraideth not. Uh, you know, and it talks about not to have any doubt when you ask God, because he says a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. So you say, well, he was talking about asking for wisdom. No, he was making a statement that a double-minded man is unstable in all of his ways. And when you're indecisive, normally it's because you're double-minded. You've got one thing on one hand, one thing on another hand. You can't make a decision, you can't make up your mind. So that's what that is. In Joshua 24 and 15, he Joshua said before they went into the promised land, he said, choose you this day whom you will serve. Make a choice. Make a choice. See, God moves history through decisive moments. And I mean, you can see that in many of the lives of the people uh in the in the word of God. Moses, an example, when he stood before Pharaoh, he had to make a decisive decision. David before Goliath, that was a decisive decision. He didn't waffle, he didn't waver, uh, he took that and made the choice at that time because remember, he went there to bring food to his brothers. He didn't go there to fight a giant. But as soon as he heard this giant defy the armies of the Most High God, David became indignant, and David made a decisive decision. So the difference between uh making and taking action and taking decisive action

Double-Mindedness And The Cost Of Wavering

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is important to understand. So we can go a little bit deeper. So taking action is a movement. You're doing something. But when you take decisive action, that's a commitment that you know will have consequences. You know, Peter Drucker said one time, he said, whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision. Notice not a cautious discussion. They didn't have a cautious discussion. They had a courageous decision moment in their life. And indecisive action kind of looks like uh, well, you know, we've got to do some more research, or we create another task force, or we're gonna delay the vote on this, or we're gonna do a soft rollout on this instead of a hard rollout. Um, but when you talk about decisive action, it looks uh and sounds like this. Well, we are exiting this market. Absolute. That's the decision. Flag's been planted, that's what's going to happen. Or we are determined uh terminating this partnership, or we are investing in AI, or we are restructuring leadership. You know, Jeff Bezos said, if you are not stubborn, if you are not stubborn, you will give up on experiments too soon, and if you're not flexible, you will pound your head against the wall. So there's a there's a balance, there's a balance that you have to be very stubborn, but at the same time, you've got to be flexible. Decisiveness is not stubbornness, it's just clarity, and then you add to clarity commitment, and then you add to it willingness to adjust if you have to. That's what makes up a decisive decision. Clarity, commitment, and a willingness to adjust if you need to. You know, when you look at biblical examples of an indecision, the best example I always go to is 1 Samuel chapter 15, and when we're talking about King Saul, the first king of Israel. God gave Saul a very clear directive regarding the Amalekites. He told them to kill them all, kill all the animals, destroy everything. That's the word that was given to Saul. He had a clear directive that was given to him by the prophet Samuel through the through the voice of God. And Saul, what did he do? He partially obeyed. He he delayed being fully obedient. He number one, he kept King Agi alive, which he was not supposed to do. Uh he spared livestock. And so this was just partial obedience, uh, which is disguised as indecision. So what was the cost? Well, Samuel tells him, because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, he hath also rejected thee from being king. He lost the kingdom. The throne was lost. Indecision cost him generational leadership. Nobody else in his family held the throne again. Now, if you want, you can look at a good business example of indecision. That's going to be Kodak. Kodak invented digital photography back in 1975. 1975, people, 1975. They had the they had digital technology for digital photography in 1975. But the leadership of Kodak was indecisive. And they were afraid, they were very much afraid, and they feared that they would cannibalize, um, they would cannibalize

Action Versus Decisive Commitment

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their their their revenue uh of the actual the film, you know, that was being used in cameras at that time. And so they were uh greatly afraid, greatly afraid of that. And uh so anyway, I I think that's a great example. Um, and there's others, you know, they hesitated, they delayed, they they they tried to protect the present. And uh, you know, what happened uh quite frankly is that they wound up filing bankruptcy in 2012. Uh so they surrendered their dominance in the industry. That's why they lost that. They were no longer the dominant player. There were thousands of jobs that were lost. There was market leadership lost. Um, you know, Clayton uh Christensen, he's a Harvard professor. He warned one time, he said, disruptive innovation can hurt if you are not the one doing the disrupting. Disruptive innovation can hurt if you are not the one doing the disrupting. Indecision allows somebody else to decide your future, is what it does. Um and there's some psychological barriers here to the reason why people don't take decisive action. You know, um Daniel Kahnman's research that he did on something called the loss aversion uh research shows that we fear loss more than we value gain. So when it comes to looking, and you're you've got the fear of, or you've got this loss that could be in one hand, and then you have the value of gain in the other hand, and all things being equal, we tip the balance towards the fear of loss. And that's what makes our decisions, or in many cases, we don't make a decision because of it. We we tend to cling to the familiar. You know, Proverbs 29, 25 says the fear of man brings a snare. You know, indecision is often a fear of criticism. Uh, it can be a fear of being wrong and what those consequences will be. It can be a fear of financial loss, uh, even a fear of relationships, of uh, of a destroyed relationship. You know, my mentor John Maxwell said one time, indecision is the thief of opportunity. Sometimes you have to be decisive in your decisions for an opportunity to be realized. And and it and it's also indecision is also the architect of regret. Um you know, we we tend to look back and see where we didn't make decisive decisions and we regret the fallout because of it. You know, Pilate,

Indecision In Scripture And Business

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uh, Pontius Pilate in Matthew 27, Pilate knew Jesus was innocent, and he symbolically washed his hands, but that was just action. He he didn't take any decisive decision, he didn't make any decisive decision uh at that point. He that there was no decisive righteousness about that. You know, and what was the cost? Well, he's remembered in history not as a courageous leader, but as a weak one. Um and when you have neutrality, when you're neutral in decisive moments, it can also create complicity uh within your own life. So I I think it's so important that we understand that. You know, if if you know, think about this. If a if a building, if a building is on fire, uh the fire chief does not form a 12-week study group. He gives commands, water begins to flow. Decisive leadership prevents catastrophe. You know, Dwight D. Eisenhower said right before D-Day, he said plans are nothing, planning is everything. And then he launched the invasion. Had he delayed, history might look a lot different. But he didn't delay. He he made a decisive decision. You know, when you look at examples as we did before, uh Bibles uh in the in the Bible, uh biblical examples, you can look at Esther. In Esther chapter four, verse fourteen, it says, Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this? I mean, she could have remained silent and not said a word. She could have protected her own comfort. But instead, she went saying, she said, If I perish, I perish. But I've made a decision. I've made a decisive decision, a decisive action. And that decisive action saved an entire nation. You know, history shifted because one woman chose courage over comfort. Um you know, when you look at Reed Hastings, he made a decisive shift from DVD rentals to streaming. Uh that was Netflix. That was Netflix. And uh Netflix uh there was an opportunity actually for Blockbuster, who is a big uh DVD rental company around the country. Uh Blockbuster was very indecisive. They had an opportunity to acquire Netflix for $50 million. And now Blockbuster's gone, and Netflix is worth over a billion dollars. So you have to understand there's a cost to indecision. And sometimes it means extinction. It means you're not around. You know, if you if we go back to David and Goliath, we talked about him for a minute, but you know, 40 days, 40 days before uh David came to the camp, 40 days Israel did nothing. They they stayed in their tents half the time. Uh the opposing army with Goliath, uh, they were out every day taunting them, trying to get them to come out into the battlefield, and they would not. But it was one shepherd boy, David, he decided. He made a decisive decision. I like what uh Malcolm Gladwell said one time about David. He said David's advantage was not his strength, but willingness to change the terms of the engagement. And that's kind of what happens when you make decisive decisions. See, decisive action, it kind of reframes the entire uh the the entire outcome. It kind of reframes the battlefield, if you will. When decisive action uh can be required, it could be a number of things. There could be an ethical compromise, it could be um maybe you're losing uh cash, you know, you're you're you have a financial hemorrhage of some sort, uh, maybe some toxic leadership

Fear, Loss Aversion, And Neutrality

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or market disruption, maybe there's some kind of crisis, um, maybe you see a decay in the culture within your company. Um, that's when you've got to take decisive action. You don't have time to form a committee to look into it. You've got to take decisive action. Andy Grove of Intel said only the paranoid survive, and I know I've quoted that before, but he decisively pivoted Intel from memory chips to microprocessors in the 1980s. And that decision saved the company because he made a hard decision, a decisive decision. Now, there's all kinds of examples of failure to decide. You know, when you look at the at the uh story of the rich young ruler in Mark chapter 10, you know, he came to Jesus and he said, uh, you know, Master, what what do I need to do to be saved? And Jesus said, Well, you know the Ten Commandments. You know, don't do this, don't do that, don't do this, don't do that. Uh, and he said, Oh, I've done all of those things. You know, I've done all of those things. And then Jesus says, Well, then go sell what you have and come and follow me. And that's the last we really hear of the rich young ruler. He he had a lot of money. And so Jesus just told him, if you really want to follow me, go sell everything you have and come follow me. And uh he went away sad. He was indecisive. He didn't make a decision. He chose comfort over calling. So, what's the process for taking decisive action? Let's talk about that a little bit. The process for taking decisive action. Well, first of all, seek God first. That's the first thing you have to do. Prayer always precedes power. Prayer always precedes power. So, Proverbs 3, 5, and 6, you know, we we know that that passage it ends with, Acknowledge me in all your ways, and I will direct your path, right? Uh, and so we have to seek God first. That's the first and foremost thing that we did. Some of the greatest decisive decisions that I have made have come after prayer and when I felt like I heard God's voice give me the direction of know what to do. If I hadn't have sought God, I wouldn't have got that direction. And and and in those in those situations, I would have gone wrong in the wrong direction. And it would have cost me dearly. So you need to seek God first. The second thing is you need to do is make make sure that you gather accurate data, make sure that you have facts uh as you move forward. You know, um, you know, the boss that I worked for for 20 some years, 24 years, I think it was, um, you know, he was the CEO of the company, president of the company, and uh I worked directly under him. And I got to tell you, one of the greatest things that he taught me was to make sure that you gather accurate data. We're talking about data. We're not we're not talking about feelings, we're not talking about what we think, we're not thinking about something that we guessed at. No, this is accurate data. You need to have facts, so make sure you gather your facts quickly in most cases. And number three, you need

When Courage Changes The Outcome

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to clarify what is the core issue. So you take those facts and now you begin to clarify what is the real problem. You begin to peel that onion back until you find the real issue. Is this structural? Is it emotional? What is it? You know, Jack Welch, who was one of the greatest leaders that General Electric GE ever had, and he said this: he said, face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be. Face reality as it is. I think that's important. So you've got to clarify that, and that starts with gathering accurate data. All right, number four, you need to count the cost. You know, decisiveness without calculating is reckless. I mean, I mean, you do have to calculate the risk. You've got to count the cost. You know, the Bible says in Luke 14 and 28, he says, you know, if you're gonna build the building, you got to count the cost. You gotta know what it's gonna cost, or you're gonna be embarrassed because you're not gonna have enough money to finish what you had designed to build, and you're gonna look foolish. So count the cost. Count the cost. Uh number five, you need to decide and declare. Joshua 1 and 9. You know, the Lord told him to be courageous, to fear not, told him that twice in that first chapter. So you have to decide. You have to make a decision. You decide, you draw a line in the sand, that's it. I've made the decision. You know, um uh somebody again that I had worked for, the same boss uh CEO that I had worked for for 20 some years, um, you know, he used to always tell me, he would say, Look, you have all kinds of time to tell me why I'm wrong about making a decision that you think I'm gonna make. You you have plenty of time. You can tell me that. But once I decide, once I decide, get in the car. Shut your mouth because this is where we're going. And I really took that to heart. But see, that was because he made the decision. He decided. And then you declare it. You know, you declare that direction and you declare it very, very uh clearly. Um, you know, and so you've got to learn to build confidence and decisiveness. You know, confidence grows from integrity, it grows from preparation, definitely from preparation. It grows in past experiences and past obediences to God. Confidence grows from clear values. You know, when you think about Paul in Acts 20, and Paul says, none of these things move me, he says, you know, nothing moves me here except for Jesus and Him crucified. That's internal stability that you get from confidence. And you'll never be able to make decisive uh decisions without being confident. You know, Elon Musk once said, he said, if something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor. Courage grows. It can grow. You can grow your courage, but it it grows by repetition.

A Step-By-Step Process To Decide

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Small daily decisions will begin to strengthen the larger ones that you have to make. So that is so critically important. Um, you know, when you look at that, yeah. Now you could look at it decisive actions as being radical because I think sometimes they are radical. You know, when Noah built the ark, you've got to think it, think about it. You know, he built an ark for 120 years. They ridiculed him. He tried to explain to them that there's going to be rain fall from the sky and it's going to flood the earth. You have to understand, up until that point, it had never rained, that the earth received moisture from dew that came every morning. There was never any rain. It had never rained. And so when he tried to explain to them about rain coming out of the sky, they thought he was crazy. And here he is building an ark on the middle of dry ground. And uh so, you know, it it seemed radical. And sometimes a decisive action seems radical. Um you know, when you you think about uh uh Moses confronting a uh uh Pharaoh, that was radical. That was radical. No negotiation, plagues were coming, and freedom followed. But he he got radical. Howard Schultz of Starbucks in 2008, he closed every store for retraining. Every store for retraining. Yep. There was a short-term loss, sure was. He calculated that. But there was a long-term cultural revival that took place at Starbucks. See, when decisive actions seem radical to certain people, that doesn't mean that you don't do it. Now you've got to get other people on board. That's important. You've got to get people on board. You know, I like what Habakkuk 2 and verse 2 says, Habakkuk, it says, uh, write the vision and make it plain. Uh, you know, Simon Sinek says people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. So you you you have to have a vision. If you have to make a radical decision or a decisive decision, you've got to explain the why. You've got to explain the cost of what happens if you don't make the decision of inaction. Here's what it's gonna cost us if we don't do this. You have to give them a long-term vision. And I'm sure that Schultz had to do that uh with Starbucks. You know, but when you have clarity, it really helps reduce the fear. Now, sometimes you're gonna have internal resistance, you can't help it. But you have to deal with that. You you have to deal with that by again giving additional um uh additional clarity, additional information. You know, in Acts chapter 15, we read about the the council in Jerusalem, and there was a disagreement uh among them at that time. There was a disagreement among them, but they had this disagreement, then they had a discussion, but then there was a decision that was made. And there were some apostles that disagreed, but unity followed that clarity once they had the clarity. So when that happens, if you do have internal resistance and if that persists, you've got to be begin to build unity and build unity within the organization because Amos 3.3 says, can two walk together except they be agreed? You have to be in agreement. And sometimes that means when you make hard decisions like that, that means you may have to shift in some of your leadership or even terminate some of your leadership on your leadership team. Uh so you have to you have to understand that, and then you have to communicate decisive decisions. You know, Ecclesiastes 3 7 says a time to keep

Vision, Unity, And Clear Communication

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silent, and then there's a time to speak. There's three timing categories here. Before, that's the collaborative input. Again, going back to my boss, uh, that I had for all those years. Then there's during, that's urgent. That's an urgent crisis. You've got to have communication during that crisis. And then after you know, maybe there's uh, you know, sensitivity matters, and so you gotta hold it back, but you have to communicate afterwards. I think that's that's important. And and it and I can give you some insights on why leaders stall sometimes because decisive action it threatens people's identity. If the decision fails, then they feel like their reputation is at risk. They feel like there's exposure of their ego. Um, I think that's that's so incredibly, incredibly important. So this week, what I'm gonna encourage you to do is I'm gonna encourage you to identify a delayed decision. Okay? Try to identify one. Then I want you to seek God. I want you to gather facts, I want you to count the cost, and then I want you to make a decision. Then I want you to communicate it real clear and then stand firm. The the the Lord the the world does not reward hesitation, trust me. You know, uh it's it's very, very important. It's very, very important. So I think it's important for you to understand that taking decisive action is something that really transformational leaders have to do, and they do it without fail because they've been conditioned to understand the importance of what uh uh uh decisive action is, and they also know what the outcome is for indecision. So it's very, very important to us. Lord, we just come before you right now in the name of Jesus. Lord, if there's somebody out there right now and they're struggling and they need to make a decisive uh decision, Lord, in their life for their business, for their department, for their personal lives, Lord, I pray, Lord, that you would remove the fear. Lord, your word declares that you've not given us a spirit of fear, but

Weekly Challenge, Prayer, And Closing

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of love, power, and a sound mind. So, Lord, I pray for them right now, and I pray that, Lord, that you remove that fear. Lord, I pray that when we get into those situations, that you give us clarity, Lord, that you strengthen our courage, that you help us to act when action is required. Lord, I pray right now that, Lord, that our decisiveness would reflect your authority and your truth. And Lord, help us to be leaders that make decisive decisions and take decisive action, Lord, when it's called for. And I thank you for that, Lord. As we learn to do that, we'll find your true godly success, which is what we want. And Lord, we ask this in the name of your son Jesus. Amen and amen. Well, thanks again for listening to today's Christian Business Concepts podcast. It looks like we're completely out of time. But until next time, remember that Jesus is Lord and He wants you blessed.

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Thank you for tuning in to this week's Christian business coming up. Go to Christian business coming from more information.