It is 11:47 on a Thursday, and the email has already been forwarded four times.
The customer is waiting in one country. The vendor is asleep in another. The person who could actually approve the fix is in a meeting that started at nine and shows no sign of ending. Everyone on the thread agrees something needs to happen. Nobody on the thread has the authority to make it happen, or if they do, they are not sure they are allowed to use it.
So it climbs. Past the manager who could have closed it in ten minutes if anyone had told her she was allowed to. Past the team that built the fix and then watched it sit in a queue. Up, and up, until it lands on one desk with one question attached.
What do you think?
That question is never really about the technical problem. By the time it reaches someone senior, the technical problem is usually the easy part. The real question, the one nobody wants to say out loud, is who was supposed to decide this in the first place, and why didn’t they.
Meet Marko Ladis
Marko Ladis is the founder of Decision Stability, a senior AV engineer at Jabra, and the host of the Decision Load podcast, and he spends his working life inside exactly that gap, the one between people who own results and people who still have to ask permission to act on them. He has spent nearly two decades as the person a problem lands on after it has already failed everywhere else, first on live show floors where the curtain still opens at eight regardless of what broke backstage, then at Google, then across an enterprise portfolio spanning EMEA. What defines him is not the resume. It is the refusal to accept “the team lacks ownership” as an answer when the real answer is usually simpler and less flattering to whoever is asking.
Five Years, Five Hundred No’s
Ladis was born in Croatia in 1990, a year he describes with characteristic dryness as bad timing. His father spent the war on the front line. His mother worked two jobs. He was raised largely by his grandparents, and he is careful to say he remembers none of it and has no interest in building an origin story out of it. Plenty of people already sell childhood as content, he says. He is not one of them.
His actual career started somewhere less tidy: he dropped out of university to work in live event production, building AV and lighting systems for touring artists and shows including Top Gear Live, The Voice, and Disney on Ice. Five years, seven days a week, over 320 hours a month in a good stretch, and a body that carried the weight of it. He calls it what it was. Not a mistake exactly, but a life he mistook for busy long enough to stop asking whether it was working.
Going back to finish the computer science degree he had walked away from felt, in his own words, like signing a confession. Hundreds of rejections followed before Google said yes and he left Croatia for Germany at twenty eight. He never made one clean decision to change course. There was no cinematic turn. He simply noticed, slowly, that staying had quietly become the plan, and that he had been re-signing for the same day for years and calling it commitment. That noticing became the seed of everything he builds now.
The Job Nobody Assigned
At Google, and later at Jabra, Ladis became the point where escalations stop moving sideways and start needing a decision. It taught him a distinction he now applies to every client conversation: by the time a problem reaches the top, the technical facts are usually clear. What is unclear is who is actually allowed to act on them.
That distinction became the Decision Stability framework, built around a discipline he applies with almost stubborn consistency. “I don’t guess at motives,” he says. “The easy explanation is always a character explanation, the team lacks ownership, people fear responsibility. What you can actually see is the movement, who sent what, to whom, with what authority.” Character stories are comfortable because they let everyone avoid looking at the structure that produced the behavior.
He is equally strict about evidence. One escalation, he argues, can prove a threshold was legitimate. It can never prove a system is broken, no matter how convincing the feeling is in the room. And sometimes the honest finding is that nothing needs fixing at all. “An advisor who can’t say that isn’t analysing,” he says. “He’s selling.”
The urgency behind this work has sharpened lately, because the tools around it changed. “AI has made answers nearly free,” Ladis says. “Judgment didn’t get cheaper at all.” He watches this from three seats at once, as an engineer inside enterprise operations, as an independent advisor, and at home with his wife, an Egyptian entrepreneur building her own company. In every seat, the pattern repeats: confident, well formatted output arriving faster than anyone can judge whether it answers the right question. “The tools can produce,” he says. “They can’t carry.” Someone still has to live inside the decision after the meeting ends.
The Ladis Playbook: 5 Lessons
Trace the movement, not the motive. Look at who sent what, to whom, and with what authority before you decide what someone’s character explains.
One example proves a threshold, not a pattern. Resist the urge to declare a system broken from a single escalation.
“Nothing worth fixing” is a legitimate finding. If your advisor can never say it, they are selling, not diagnosing.
Delegation that keeps a final yes attached isn’t delegation. It’s just moving where the typing happens.
Ask before it becomes an emergency. The people who wait until they can’t avoid asking usually pay the highest price at the worst hour.
What Actually Closes the Loop
Back to that Thursday email, the one that climbed four forwards before anyone with real authority looked at it. Ladis would say the fix was never really about the vendor or the sleeping timezone. It was about a company that never decided, out loud and in advance, who gets to say yes.
He built a framework, a podcast, and an entire evening practice around a question that used to just be his own, asked by strangers on a show floor when something broke five minutes before the curtain went up. He still asks it, of himself and of every leadership team that hands him one real decision that came back too far.
Nobody assigns the desk it lands on. Somebody just ends up sitting there.
Marko Ladis is the Founder of Decision Stability and a senior AV engineer at Jabra, based in Hamburg, Germany. He advises founders and executive teams on decision ownership and escalation design, and hosts the Decision Load podcast.
