Are Cyber-Squirrels Stealing Your Leadership ACORNs?

OK homeowners, how much of your disposable income goes to squirrel-proofing your bird-feeders? And yet...

HR Guru JP Elliott is back with a new podcast featuring a book on leadership decision-making. The book is authored by Caroline Webb, former McKinsey partner and thought-leader on leadership processes.

Webb has distilled her experience working with leaders into a new book, Leadership Intelligence: Science-Backed Strategies for Mastering 21 Everyday Management Challenges (Crown Currency, 2026). She has developed a simple decision model she calls ACORN:

Aim: What are we actually trying to accomplish?

​Criteria: What would a good outcome look like?

​Options: What alternatives are we considering?

​Rate: How does each option perform against our criteria?

​Next steps: What happens from here?

Sounds easy, right?

Easy just like when you think "I'm going to get a bird-feeder that NO SQUIRREL can get to, hahahahahaha!"

Once again, don't get fooled by thinking this issue occurs only in HR. Leaders in any functional area have limited time and a lot of constituencies that depend on sound and durable decision-making process.

Ask yourself this: the last time you had to decide on a way forward, what interfered with your decision-making? You had data, you had experience, you had input from others -- did you also have time pressure, budget realities, peer politics, and uncertainty?

Those are the squirrels. They are there to steal your ACORN process.

What do you do to defeat the squirrels?

Do you build a more elaborate decision matrix, bring in six-sigma gurus, call your pal in engineering to get permission? Or do you clarify your inputs, determine your goals, and set up success criteria?

Cyber-defenders are faced with decisions every hour. Your enemies are time pressure and the insidious nature of hackers and plain old bureaucracy. [Note: I actually typed "bureau-crazy"; you're welcome.] After a while all those seemingly obvious decision criteria get garbled. This is even more reason to gain the most clarity possible as quickly as possible.

Break it down to an ACORN.

That decision based on the ACORN can grow into a beautiful oak tree. Or it can become squirrel chow.

Ask us how you can stop the steal.

(image credit:gunthercox, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)