There are infinite ways to "spin" inaction as cautious analysis or being conservative. It's much more difficult to spin an intentional decision that you are acc

There are infinite ways to "spin" inaction as cautious analysis or being conservative. It's much more difficult to spin an intentional decision that you are accountable for that went wrong. The higher up you go, the higher the cost of a bad decision becomes, while the value of a correct decision doesn't really increase that much compared to someone lower down making the same call successfully. Basically, you're expected to make the right call more often than not when you are higher up. Amazon literally has a thing in their leadership principles about how good leaders are just "right" more often than bad leaders. All of these incentives lead to many, many situations where it is not in any one executive's best interest to make a decision to move forward on something. So they all just sit on it.