Author: The Cred Podcast

Posted on

Instinct, Ownership, and the Discipline of Decision-Making

Instinct, Ownership, and the Discipline of Decision-Making

Rafat Ali doesn’t take notes.

And he makes decisions on instinct.

In this episode, the founder and CEO of Skift breaks down how he actually makes decisions as a global operator, committing to a choice, avoiding second-guessing, and never falling in love with a single option. He explains how visualization helps him pressure-test hires, products, and acquisitions, why early yellow flags almost always turn red, and the defining mistake early in his career when he sold his first company.

Rafat looks for two signals when decisions are being made. First, is there a clear owner who will carry it forward once the conversation ends, or is it drifting in a sea of shared responsibility? When no one is clearly on the hook, progress slows and things slip. Second, he pays attention to how people handle details as a gauge for decision readiness. The people who think through implications and follow through are usually the ones prepared to make the call, not just weigh in.

Tune in for a candid conversation about instinct, ownership, and what it really means to decide.

Posted on

The Power of Contextual Decision-Making with Lisa Pillette

The Power of Contextual Decision-Making with Lisa Pillette

“I’ve probably seen more erroneous decision-making by over-reliance on data than by over-reliance on gut.”

In this episode of The Cred Podcast, Mack McKelvey sits down with Lisa Pellette, a global CMO and transformation leader whose career spans Levi’s, Ralph Lauren, Lacoste, Casper, and Fossil Group, to talk about how data, context, and gut converge to inform decisions.

Drawing on her background in psychology and decades of experience leading iconic brands and major transformations, Lisa unpacks the importance of defining a clear North Star, relying on contextual decision-making, and building your own team of decision-makers. Plus, learn how culture shapes whether mistakes are metabolized into momentum or friction.

Posted on

The Power of Contextual Decision-Making

The Power of Contextual Decision-Making

There’s a persistent belief in modern leadership that better data leads to better decisions. But after decades leading global brands through growth, disruption, and transformation, Lisa Pellette has come to a different conclusion: data is necessary, but it’s rarely sufficient.

The problem arises when numbers are viewed in isolation, stripped of the context that gives them meaning. Metrics can tell you what is happening, but they often fail to explain why. And when leaders mistake symptoms for causes, they end up solving the wrong problem with great confidence.

This is where Lisa draws a sharp distinction between data-driven decision-making and contextual decision-making. Context includes everything data alone can’t capture: brand health, cultural nuance, timing, consumer intent, internal dynamics, and the patterns that repeat across cycles and markets. Decisions don’t happen in a vacuum. They sit inside ecosystems. 

Your Gut Isn’t Guesswork

What many people label as “gut instinct” is often misunderstood. In Lisa’s view, gut isn’t guesswork or impulse; it’s pattern recognition built over time. It’s the accumulation of experience, seeing similar moments unfold across industries, markets, and teams, and recognizing the signals before they fully show up in the numbers. This is why she’s seen more bad decisions come from over-reliance on data than from over-reliance on gut. Data can be framed to support almost any narrative. Judgment, shaped by experience and context, is harder to fake.

Another critical piece of her framework is something teams frequently skip: commitment. Many organizations are good at analysis and alignment, but far less disciplined about committing to a decision once it’s made. Agility gets confused with constant revisiting. Clarity often comes after commitment, not before it.

Building Decision-Makers

Lisa is equally direct about leadership responsibility. The job of a leader isn’t to be the perpetual decider; it’s to build decision-makers. Teams shouldn’t escalate problems upward without doing the work. They should arrive with options, tradeoffs, and context. That’s how judgment scales inside an organization and how leaders avoid becoming bottlenecks.

How Mistakes are Metabolized

Errors are inevitable, especially in environments that encourage innovation and first-mover behavior. What matters is whether the culture allows those mistakes to turn into learning and momentum or whether they calcify into fear and friction. The same mistake can be a catalyst or a liability, depending entirely on the environment around it.

At its core, good decision-making comes from understanding context, trusting experience, committing to a direction, and creating a culture where it’s OK to make a mistake.

This perspective is explored in depth in Mack McKelvey’s conversation with Lisa Pellette on The Cred Podcast.

Posted on

Sliding Doors Decisions with Sarah Pousho

Sliding Doors Decisions with Sarah Pousho

What happens when a lifelong fascination with space collides with a 30-year career in building complex commercial deals?

This week, Mack McKelvey sits down with Sarah Pousho, Co-Founder and CEO of Space Bridge Partners, to explore the unconventional decisions that shaped her career and how she now helps fund some of the most ambitious space missions in the world.

Sarah traces her path from aspiring astronaut to consumer products executive, and ultimately back to the space sector, where she leads a new model for funding exploration, science, and education missions.

The conversation dives into:

  • Making high-stakes decisions when the buck truly stops with you
  • Blending gut instinct with expert input and data
  • How decades of deal-making prepared Sarah for the complexities of space missions
  • The personal decisions that quietly set the course for an entire career

This episode is a candid look at confidence earned over time, the power of non-linear paths, and the “Sliding Doors” decisions you make in your life.

00:00 Journey to Space Bridge Partners

07:54 Decision-Making in High-Stakes Environments

19:19 Navigating Outcomes and Learning from Mistakes

27:04 Future Plans for Space Bridge Partners

Posted on

How a Journalist’s Mindset Drives Better Decision-Making with Margaret Magnarelli

How a Journalist’s Mindset Drives Better Decision-Making with Margaret Magnarelli

In this episode, Mack talks with Margaret Magnarelli, VP of Marketing and Communications at Baldor Specialty Foods, about how her roots in journalism shape the way she leads, makes decisions, and builds teams. Before leading marketing for one of the East Coast’s largest specialty food distributors, Margaret spent years as an editor at Seventeen, Good Housekeeping, and Money Magazine, a background that taught her to ask better questions, understand audiences deeply, and communicate with empathy.

She and Mack dive into how those same skills translate into stronger leadership: knowing when to move fast or slow, balancing data with intuition, and helping her team make confident, customer-centric choices. It’s a conversation about curiosity, clarity, and what it really takes to make thoughtful decisions in a fast-moving business.

Posted on

The Cred Podcast: 2025 Wrap-Up

The Cred Podcast: 2025 Wrap-Up

In 2025, The Cred Podcast focused on one recurring reality: decision-making is rarely clean, linear, or comfortable. Across conversations with founders, executives, operators, and advisors, host Mack McKelvey explored how real decisions get made when certainty is low, pressure is high, and outcomes aren’t guaranteed.

Beyond frameworks or formulas, our guests shared their lived experiences: how they decide, what they’ve learned from decisions that worked, and what stuck with them from the ones that didn’t.

Below are some of the moments that captured that theme most clearly:

  • “That’s the ground truth of leadership right now. We’re swimming in data, drowning in options, and still somehow starving for clarity.” — Camille Preston
  • “If you know you want to be the decider, then you probably need to be in a role that gives you the room to do that.” — Marci Weisler
  • Some people talk about trusting their gut. Gladys Kong has learned how to explain hers.
  • “Decisions aren’t always easy, but you have to move when something is pressing. And if you make a bad decision, you pivot.” — Sheila Marmon
  • Great decisions aren’t made in isolation. They’re tested, refined, written, rewritten, and said out loud until the idea earns its clarity. —Terence Kawaja
  • “Even if it feels like it was a mistake in the moment, there may be some green shoots to come out of it.” — Margaret Magnarelli
  • In leadership, there are no easy answers. If it was easy, someone else would have already made the call.  —Jason Kaplan 

If 2025 reinforced anything, it’s that decision-making isn’t about having perfect information. It’s about judgment, ownership, and the willingness to act and adapt when the path forward isn’t obvious.

As the show heads into the year ahead, that tension remains at the center: how leaders navigate complexity, make calls that matter, and live with what comes next.

Posted on

Head, Heart, Wallet: Inside Marci Weisler’s Decision-Making Framework

Head, Heart, Wallet: Inside Marci Weisler’s Decision-Making Framework

Marci Weisler didn’t build her career by following a script. She followed her curiosity. From analyst to mobile pioneer, from co-founding SWSI Media (which became Viacom’s Queen Boss) to leading a major line of business at T-Mobile and now advising companies as a managing director in investment banking — Marci has made a career out of stepping into what’s new before it’s obvious.

In this episode, she talks with Mack about why she’s always chased the “bright, shiny” emerging ideas, how her Head, Heart, Wallet framework keeps her grounded when the stakes rise, and what she’s learned from the decisions that didn’t go as planned. She also shares how decision-making shifts when you move from a startup to a matrixed giant, and why the environment you’re in should shape how you choose.

It’s a practical, candid look at how leaders refine their judgment and why curiosity, not certainty, is often the smarter compass.

Posted on

Be Clear on the Outcome, Flexible on the Approach: Decision-Making Lessons from Dr. Camille Preston

Be Clear on the Outcome, Flexible on the Approach: Decision-Making Lessons from Dr. Camille Preston

Leaders today are facing a strange paradox: more data than ever before, yet less clarity. Decisions that once felt straightforward now arrive wrapped in complexity, competing priorities, and shifting conditions. 

In her conversation with Mack on The Cred Podcast, business psychologist and executive coach Dr. Camille Preston offered a grounded way to navigate that reality. Not with more speed or analysis, but with better perspective and deeper integration.

One of her core concepts is that leaders can’t make every decision from the same “altitude.” Some moments require ground-level detail; others demand the 40,000-foot view. Camille encourages leaders to consciously move between those vantage points because what feels confusing up close often becomes clear when you zoom out; and what seems obvious at a high level can look very different when you drop back into the details. This intentional shifting of altitude helps leaders consider a decision from multiple angles before they commit.

Integrated Decision-Making

But altitude alone won’t get you there. Camille emphasizes that the best decisions are integrated decisions: ones that draw on the head, the heart, and the body. Analysis matters, but it isn’t the whole story. Emotion, intuition, and physical cues all hold information leaders often overlook. When leaders learn to listen inward and integrate those forms of intelligence, they make decisions that are clearer, steadier, and far more enduring.

Camille also shared her Donut Model, which helps leaders understand the difference between comfort, growth, and burnout. The comfort zone (in the center) feels good but rarely leads to meaningful progress. The burnout zone (outer edge) drains leaders of capacity and perspective. The learning zone — the stretch space between comfort and overwhelm — is where most effective leadership happens. The challenge is developing the awareness to know where you’re operating and adjusting accordingly, rather than pushing harder or retreating too fast.

Clear Outcomes, Flexible Approach

Threaded through all of this is the principle Camille returns to again and again: be clear on the outcome, flexible on the approach. Leaders often get stuck when they become rigid about the “how,” even when conditions shift or new information emerges. Camille argues that clarity doesn’t require inflexibility, and flexibility doesn’t mean indecision. The combination is what creates true leadership agility.

In a world where decisions are rarely black and white, where we’re flooded with information but starved for signal, Camille’s approach offers a practical, human way to find clarity again. It’s not about knowing more — it’s about seeing differently, listening inward, and leading from a more integrated place.

To hear the full conversation, you can listen to the episode here 🎧.

Posted on

Clear on the Outcome, Flexible on the Approach with Camille Preston, PhD

Clear on the Outcome, Flexible on the Approach with Camille Preston, PhD

Camille Preston went to the beach to start writing her book… and it promptly snowed 13 inches for the first time in more than a decade. An abrupt reminder that conditions change fast, even when you think you know what’s coming. It’s the perfect setup for this conversation about how leaders actually make decisions today.

A business psychologist and author of Living Real, Camille challenges the old markers of success and pushes leaders to understand themselves well enough to make decisions from the inside out. She talks about being “totally put together and a hot mess,” not as a contradiction but as an honest snapshot of what it feels like to lead on shifting ground.

In this conversation with Mack, Camille shares the tools she uses with leaders every day: adjusting altitude to get the right perspective, using integrated decision-making so the head, heart, and body all inform the choice, and applying her Donut Model to recognize when you’re in comfort, growth, or approaching burnout. Across it all, she comes back to the idea that anchors her approach: be clear on the outcome, flexible on the approach. In a world flooded with data but starved for real clarity, Camille argues that the most valuable leadership skill is the ability to pause, shift perspective, and listen inward.

Posted on

Explaining Your Gut: 5 Lessons in Better Decision-Making from Gladys Kong

Explaining Your Gut: 5 Lessons in Better Decision-Making from Gladys Kong

Gladys Kong, CEO of Azira, approaches decisions the way an engineer would: with logic, structure, and curiosity. But even she admits that data can only take you so far.

In her conversation with Mack McKelvey on The Cred Podcast, Gladys shared how she balances analytics with instinct, logic with empathy, and leadership with transparency. Her approach is less about being right and more about helping others understand how to think so every decision, good or bad, becomes a learning moment.

Here are five takeaways from that discussion that every leader can put into practice.

1. Data guides, but it doesn’t decide.

Gladys starts every major decision with data, but she never lets it be the final word.

“We’re a data company, so we have to be data-driven. But data doesn’t tell you everything.”

She layers data with perspective: feedback from her team, customers, and her own experience. Data is her compass, not her map. It points her in the right direction, but judgment and context determine the path forward.

2. Don’t ignore your gut, explain it.

When something doesn’t feel right, Gladys doesn’t dismiss it or act on impulse. She slows down to understand it.

“I’ve learned to articulate why I’m uncomfortable with something—to put words to it.”

That self-awareness turns intuition into actionable reasoning her team can understand, debate, and learn from. By taking the time to articulate her instincts, she transforms a private hunch into a shared insight, one that builds alignment instead of confusion.

3. Make your reasoning visible.

Explaining how you reached a decision isn’t just good communication, it’s leadership training. By articulating her process, Gladys gives her team a framework to apply on their own. They don’t just know what she decided, they learn how to think about similar choices in the future. It’s a way of scaling judgment across an organization.

4. Share mistakes with transparency, not blame.

Gladys doesn’t sweep bad outcomes under the rug. When something goes wrong, she and her team analyze it together.

“In every decision you make that’s incorrect, there’s something to learn.”

That openness builds trust and helps everyone spot blind spots faster next time. By normalizing reflection instead of defensiveness, she creates space for honesty and transparency.

5. Focus beats perfection.

As a startup leader, Gladys knows there’s never enough time or data to get everything right. Instead of chasing perfect answers, she focuses on what matters most: serving customers, driving growth, and keeping the team aligned on purpose.

When you stay focused on what truly moves the business forward, progress matters more than polish.

Decision-making isn’t about getting it right every time. It’s about having a clear process, understanding your reasoning, and helping others do the same. Gladys Kong shows that when leaders take the time to explain their thinking, they don’t just make better calls—they build smarter, more capable teams.

🎧 Listen to the full conversation on The Cred Podcast HERE.