Why Decisions Make Relationship Capital Matter

In January 2006, two Bain partners published an article in Harvard Business Review called "Who Has the D?" It became one of HBR's most-read pieces on management. The premise was simple. Decisions are the coin of the realm in business. Every success, every mishap, every opportunity seized or missed traces back to a chain of decisions someone made or failed to make.

Rogers and Blenko were writing about organizations. Ambiguity about who decides stalls companies. Their fix was a framework called RAPID that assigns clear roles: who recommends, who gives input, who must agree, who performs the work, and who decides. One rule sat at the center. Only one person holds the D…the power to make the decision.

Twenty years later, I'd push the idea one level deeper. It's not just organizations that run on decisions. Your career runs on them. Your business runs on them. And almost none of the decisions that matter to you are yours to make.

Think about any goal you're working toward right now. Big or small. Somewhere between you and that goal sits a decision that belongs to someone else.

A decision to answer your call. To respond to your cold email. To consider you for the interview. To hire you. To fund your idea. To approve your budget. To promote you. To take the meeting. To sign the deal. To invest in your company.

Every one of those moments has a D. And you don't hold it.

So what happens in the mind of the person who does? When your request lands, they run a quiet evaluation. Most of it is unconscious and it takes seconds:

Do I know this person?
Do I trust them?
Can they deliver something I need? Will they solve my problem, help me hit my goals, make my day better?

Then a fourth factor shapes all three: the state of your dialogue. When did we last talk? How often do we talk? Was it relevant to anything I care about?

That evaluation is your relationship capital being spent or found insufficient. Trust, value, and dialogue, weighed in an instant, deciding whether the door opens.

The data backs up how much this matters. Bain's follow-up research across hundreds of companies found a 95 percent correlation between decision effectiveness and top-tier financial results. Decisions are where performance actually happens. Which means relationships with decision makers are where your access to performance actually happens.

Here's why this matters more right now, not less.

AI is being pointed at every part of go-to-market. Automated outreach. Generated content. Agents that prospect, qualify, and follow up while you sleep. All of it optimizes for reach. None of it changes what happens when the message arrives.

Gartner's research shows a typical B2B buying group now includes 6 to 10 decision makers, each doing their own research before they ever talk to you. Automation can hit ten inboxes. It cannot build consensus among ten people. Consensus gets built through trust, and trust gets built person by person, over time, through demonstrated value.

As AI floods every channel with competent, personalized, instant messages, the "do I know this person" filter gets stronger, not weaker. Volume is now free, so volume signals nothing. What can't be automated is a track record. A person who remembers that you delivered. Who watched you invest in them before you needed anything.

The uncomfortable question is this: for the decisions that will shape your next two years, who holds the D? Can you name them? And if your request landed on their desk tomorrow, what would that quiet evaluation return?

Most people can't answer. Not because their relationships are weak, but because they've never mapped them against their goals. They network broadly and hope. Hope is not a strategy for decisions you don't control.

The alternative is deliberate. Define your goals. Identify the people whose decisions those goals depend on. Then honestly evaluate the strength of each relationship: how deep it goes, how relevant it is to where you're headed, where that person sits, and how much influence they carry. Invest first, before you need the door to open.

You'll never hold most of the Ds that shape your life. But you can decide, starting now, what the person holding one finds when they ask themselves: do I know this person, do I trust them, will they bring me value?

That answer is being written today, in the relationships you're building or neglecting. Long before the decision ever comes up.

This week's essay is about who holds the D. My latest guest on The Relationship Capitalists has spent two decades studying the people who hold it.

Sharon Gillenwater built Boardroom Insiders from $200,000 in seed capital to a $25 million exit, profiling Fortune 500 executives so sellers could engage them as human beings instead of targets. Now she's rebuilding the category with AI at ExecutiveIQ. Her entire career is a study in decision-maker engagement.

One story from our conversation stuck with me. Her customers kept reporting the same thing: a year of calls, emails, and event ambushes trying to reach one executive, then a single relevant insight in one email, and a reply in five minutes. Not because the pitch got better. Because it connected to something that executive needed to accomplish to succeed in their job.

That's the quiet evaluation from this week's essay, passed in an instant. Do you know me? Is this relevant to my goals? Sharon puts it simply: when you show a decision maker you understand what they're on the hook for, they're almost obligated to talk to you.

She also confirms where AI fits. Senior tech executives are so flooded with automated pitches that many have stopped updating their LinkedIn profiles. They don't want to be found. When they need to buy, they ask peers they trust. The door doesn't open through volume. It opens through relevance and relationship.

Her advice on AI is the best one-line policy I've heard: use it on anything that doesn't touch people. Research the company, decode the earnings call, find the intersection with your work. Then lead with your humanity.

Listen to the full conversation with Sharon Gillenwater on The Relationship Capitalists, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

LinkedIn now processes an average of 11,000 job applications per minute, according to reporting from the New York Times. That's up 45 percent in a year. The surge isn't more people looking for work. It's AI tools letting one person apply to hundreds of jobs overnight.

The result: postings routinely draw 300-plus applicants, most submitted in under a minute. Employers responded the only way they could, with AI screening the pile. Candidates now use AI to write applications that AI reads and rejects. Bots talking to bots, with a human career hanging in the balance.

Here's the number that matters. Industry analysis puts cold application success rates as low as 0.1 to 2 percent, while referred candidates convert at an estimated four to seven times the rate of cold applicants. And that gap is widening as the cold pile grows.

Read that through this week's lens. A job offer is a chain of decisions: the decision to open your file, to interview you, to hire you. When 300 strangers stand in the automated queue, the referral skips it entirely. Why? Because a referral is borrowed trust. Someone the decision maker already knows is saying: I know this person, I trust them, they deliver.

That is relationship capital converting directly into a decision. And it's the clearest evidence yet of where things are headed. The more AI floods the channel, the more the decision maker retreats to the one signal that can't be generated: a trusted human vouching for another.

The queue is free now. The relationship never was. That's exactly why it still works.

Identify one person who holds a D on something you care about in the next six months. Before asking for anything, send them something useful with no ask attached. An article, an introduction, a piece of feedback. Deposit first.

Reply to one message this week you would normally let sit. Speed of response is a trust signal. It tells people their time matters to you before you need theirs.

If you want to actually map this instead of just thinking about it, the free Assess & Build Your Relationship Capital Workbook walks you through it: define your goals across three horizons, identify the 50 people who matter most to them, and score each relationship on Depth, Relevance, Position, and Influence. It takes an evening. It will change what you see.

Then take the PowerSkills Assessment and explore more at PowerSkills.com.

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