Twenty-some people met each other for the first time on Wednesday morning in my NYU classroom. Founders-to-be, people already running their own thing, a couple of people inheriting family businesses, a handful climbing inside big corporations. Different rooms, different stakes, same species of problem: how do you build and lead a team.
At the end of the first class, I asked them to write on a sticky note — one thing to start doing, one thing to stop, one thing to keep. What they felt after our first class session. No grading, just get it down.
I read through the stack later that night. Most of what people write in an exercise like this is forgettable in a nice way — "communicate more," "listen better." Fine. True. Not sharp.
Not true of these aspiring entrepreneurs.
One note in particular stopped me.
Stop waiting for permission to create.
That one's not about time management. That's someone naming, on day one of a graduate program, the exact thing that's been quietly trained out of most of us by the time we're running anything that matters.
A room that wasn't supposed to be about this
I want to tell you where I first learned that lesson, because it wasn't in a classroom and nobody wrote it on a sticky note.
I was in a division meeting at American Express — the kind with a fixed shape everyone knew before walking in. Financial review. Some recognition. Priorities for the quarter. You could predict the rhythm of it before it started.
Our division president broke the rhythm. He'd get through the numbers and then, some meetings, he'd just start talking — not about the plan, about how he thought about leading. No slide for it. No agenda line. He was a big presence, someone the room leaned toward when he did this, and one day what came out was: better to ask forgiveness than permission.
I've turned that sentence over for decades. It's not really about permission. It's about what happens to people when the safest move is always the one that requires a form, a sign-off, a green light from somebody two levels up or sideways who's never seen the thing up close the way you have. Organizations don't usually announce that they're training this into people. They just build enough approval steps that eventually the only reliable way to move is to stop asking.
He wasn't telling us to be reckless. He was telling us — in a room built for reporting upward, not for saying anything real — that the invisible incentive most of us were operating under was backwards, and that he knew it, and that we should act accordingly.
The same muscle, different postures
The permission note wasn't alone in that stack. Two others, from people who'd never met the AmEx version of me:
Start listening more to my teammates.
Stop shying away from asking questions.
Different words, same muscle. Listening more is really "stop assuming your read on the room is the correct one without checking." Asking the question you'd rather not ask is really "stop protecting your own comfort at the expense of getting it right." Waiting for permission is really "stop treating your own judgment as insufficient until someone you respect confirms it."
None of these people know each other. None of them have run a division, or anything close to it yet. And they landed, independently, in the same place I landed after years of watching a president who understood something most leaders never say out loud: the thing standing between a team and better outcomes is rarely a strategy problem. It's whether the people closest to the work believe they're allowed to act on what they see.
What this looks like in practice
"Ask forgiveness, not permission" makes a good poster and a bad operating instruction if you leave it there. It only works as a practice, not a slogan, and the practice has three parts I've come to trust.
Size the risk honestly before you act, not after. Forgiveness-not-permission is not a blank check. It's a bet that you understand the downside well enough to own it. Before I moved without asking, I got in the habit of asking myself one question: if this goes wrong, can I explain the reasoning to the person who'd have said no, and will it hold up? If the honest answer is "no, I'm just hoping it works," that's not courage. That's just skipping a step you were afraid would slow you down.
Tell your boss after — clearly, and fast. The forgiveness part isn't a hope that no one notices. It's a deliberate choice to act first and report immediately, in full, without softening what you did. I never let more than a day pass. The people I respected most as bosses didn't mind being surprised nearly as much as they minded being kept in the dark.
Notice when "I can't get permission" means "I don't want the exposure." This is the one people skip. Sometimes the real obstacle isn't the approval chain — it's that acting without a sign-off means the outcome is unambiguously yours. No one to share the credit or the blame with. That discomfort is worth naming honestly, because it's not the same problem as an actual approval bottleneck, and it needs a different fix — usually just deciding you're willing to be the one who's accountable.
What changed for me
I didn't become someone who ignored process. I became someone who stopped mistaking process for permission to think.
The clearest marker of it: I started bringing half-formed ideas into rooms before they were safe to bring — before I had the data locked, before I could defend every assumption — because waiting for that kind of certainty was really just waiting for someone else to have already made the decision. That one sentence, dropped into a meeting that wasn't supposed to be about leadership at all, is the reason I've spent a career more willing to move first and explain later than to wait for a yes that might never come.
Twenty-some people just started a graduate course on building and leading teams. A few of them already know, before anyone's taught them a single framework, that permission-seeking is the habit worth breaking first. I hope the rest of the semester doesn't train it back out of them. Most organizations will try.