Have you ever looked back at a decision and wondered what you were thinking? It is a familiar feeling for anyone who runs a team or a company, and the instinct is usually to blame yourself. You assume you missed something obvious, or that your judgment failed you in a moment that mattered. But the more useful question is not whether you made a mistake. It is what put you in the position to make it. According to one entrepreneur who has spent years making high-stakes calls with incomplete information, most poor decisions have far less to do with the person and far more to do with the pressure surrounding them.
Jason Turner is an entrepreneur, engineer, and inventor, and the co-founder of PowerShades, a company he helped grow from a two-person startup sharing a single office into a thriving organization of more than fifty employees before its successful acquisition in 2025. Along the way, Jason Turner faced countless moments where decisions had to be made quickly, with tight timelines and significant consequences. That experience gave him a grounded, unsentimental view of why smart, capable people still make decisions they later regret, and what leaders can actually do to change the odds.
Bad Decisions Usually Start With Bad Conditions
Jason Turner is quick to give people the benefit of the doubt. In his experience, poor decisions are rarely a sign that someone is incompetent. They tend to happen when a person is overwhelmed, working against a tight timeline, or missing the information they need and forced to act anyway. As he describes it, poor decisions are usually not the result of someone being bad at their job. They are the result of what happens day to day, when one fire after another demands an immediate answer and there is no room to slow down and think.
This reframing matters because it changes where you look when something goes wrong. If you assume the problem is the person, you start managing people more tightly. If you assume the problem is the condition, you start asking what made a clear-headed decision impossible in that moment. The practical takeaway from Jason Turner is simple. The next time you review a decision that did not go well, resist the urge to assign blame first. Ask instead what the person knew, how much time they had, and what pressure they were under. More often than not, the answer lives there.
Working On the Business Instead of In It
One of the phrases Jason Turner returns to came from mentors earlier in his career. They told him to spend more time working on the business instead of in the business. The distinction is easy to understand and surprisingly hard to live by. Working in the business means handling the daily problems as they arrive. Working on it means stepping back to build the plan and strategy that prevent so many of those problems from recurring in the first place.
Jason Turner is honest that he does not always get this right, and that staying consistent at it is difficult. The pull toward the urgent is strong, and the most reactive day often feels like the most productive one. What helps, he explains, is consciously handing real decision-making ability to a qualified team so that the leader is freed up to think ahead rather than react in the moment. For any reader, the lesson is that strategic thinking does not happen automatically when things finally calm down. It has to be protected on purpose, because the daily noise will fill every gap you leave open.
How Silos Quietly Sabotage Good Decisions
When stress in the company climbs, Jason Turner has noticed a specific pattern. Different groups, whether manufacturing, procurement, engineering, or sales, often turn out to be fighting the same problem from inside their own silos, each trying to solve it separately and without knowing the others are stuck on the same thing. The cost of that isolation is significant, and most of it stays invisible until people finally compare notes.
The fix he describes is almost unglamorous in its simplicity. Get everyone in the same room for an hour and let each department say what it is dealing with. Jason Turner has watched problems that lingered for weeks get solved in minutes once the right people could hear each other. A recurring issue on the factory floor, mentioned out loud, might prompt an engineer in the same meeting to offer a twenty-minute change that makes it disappear. He is candid that video calls help, but in his view there is no substitute for spending that time and talking face to face. The takeaway for any leader is that many of your hardest problems are not actually hard. They are simply being solved alone, by people who would solve them together in a fraction of the time.
The Hidden Cost of the Hero Leader
Many organizations quietly celebrate the leader who rushes in at the last minute and saves the day. Jason Turner sees a real danger in that model. When a team becomes reliant on one person swooping in to make the final call, it stops preparing. People put things off, because they have learned that someone else will absorb the decision at the eleventh hour. He points to the old reminder that proper preparation prevents poor performance, and notes that while heroic saves are sometimes necessary, they become corrosive once they turn into the norm.
Underneath this is a truth Jason Turner states plainly. Nobody has all the knowledge, and nobody holds all the cards. At PowerShades, he and his team put that belief into practice by placing QR codes around the office so anyone, regardless of job title, can submit an idea for a better process, a cost saving, or a new product. He has found that recognition is a powerful motivator, and that it works best when it is tailored to the individual, since a gift card means something to one person while an afternoon off means more to another. The point is not the QR code. It is the assumption behind it, which is that the people closest to the work usually see what leadership cannot.
“The best ideas come from the people that are doing the work every day, not somebody sitting in an office.”
Jason Turner, co-founder of PowerShades
Giving People Boundaries Instead of Bottlenecks
Jason Turner is careful to distinguish autonomy from chaos. He talks about giving people boundaries, or bumpers, that let them make decisions confidently within a clear lane. His sales team needs the freedom to handle discounts and concessions in the field without asking permission for every move, and he uses a familiar image to explain why. He compares the alternative to buying a car, where the salesperson keeps leaving the room to check with someone else, a process he finds both exhausting and a little absurd. He is also the first to admit that some areas demand strict discipline, since every PowerShades order has to be traceable for years so the team can pinpoint exactly which components went into it if a problem appears later. Where that level of control is not essential, though, he prefers to let people decide.
The same philosophy shapes how PowerShades handles customer service. Jason Turner empowers his customer service team to make a customer happy in the moment, even when it costs the company something, because he has seen how often that short-term cost pays off over the long term. He frames it as the difference between winning the battle and losing the war. A concession that stings today can earn a loyal customer who returns for years and tells others why. The lesson for readers is that real autonomy requires two things at once: clear boundaries so people know their limits, and genuine trust so they are not forced to escalate every small decision up the chain.
Why Clarity Beats Speed
Before the 2025 acquisition, Jason Turner says his company prioritized speed. As engineers who had not originally set out to start this business, he and his co-founder built their early growth on rapid innovation, striving to launch something new at nearly every industry show. That speed gave them an edge in an industry that had not traditionally been high tech, but it carried a cost. Being first sometimes meant releasing a product too soon and then chasing a string of firmware updates to fix what more testing might have caught.
Under new ownership, Jason Turner has watched the company shift toward thoroughness, with testing and stage gates that occasionally frustrate him but consistently produce smoother launches. He credits a real marketing department and added design resources with helping the company sell the lifestyle benefit of its products rather than only the technology. The deeper change, in his telling, was learning to calm down and focus on strategy instead of constantly reaching for the newest thing. He describes the question that now drives the company as figuring out what it does well and how to do that even better, rather than trying to be all things to all people. For any leader weighing how fast to move, his experience is a useful caution. Speed can win the moment, but clarity about what you do best is what holds up over time.
Better Conditions, Not Smarter People
If there is a single thread running through everything Jason Turner shared, it is that better decisions do not come from people suddenly becoming smarter. They come from leaders building the conditions where good decisions are easier to make. That means breaking down silos, protecting time to think, spreading decision-making authority, and trusting the people closest to the work to tell you what they see.
It also means doing the humble, hands-on parts of leadership. Jason Turner still helps with installations, travels with his sales team, and steps onto the factory floor, because that is where people open up and where the real problems reveal themselves. He learned this watching a plant manager who spent weeks working each station before changing anything, and who earned the floor’s respect precisely because he did the work alongside them. As Jason Turner puts it, when the rubber meets the road is where you find the problems and the pain points.
The thought to carry into your own week is small but durable. Get your ego out of the way, as Jason Turner advises, and start listening to the people around you, because you do not know everything, and they often know exactly what is wrong. For a leader who built a company from two people to more than fifty and a successful exit, that is not soft advice. Coming from Jason Turner, it is the discipline that made the difference.
