Advisers Advise, Ministers Decide: A Founder’s Manifesto

In the spirit of Thatcher—and with apologies to everyone who just spat out their ethically sourced oat milk—here’s a gentle reminder for anyone who’s ever outsourced conviction to a consultant: If you’re a founder relying on beautifully formatted advice to hide your own indecision, Thatcher wouldn’t have had time for you—and neither should your board.

The Origin: A Handbag and a Principle

“Advisers advise, ministers decide.” The line has the snappiness of a military order, the finality of a judge’s gavel, and the kind of semantic clarity that only Margaret Thatcher could weaponize with such regularity. She didn’t coin it—Sir Humphrey Appleby probably wishes he had—but she made it her lodestar during her premiership, particularly when civil servants, spin doctors, or the men with MBAs attempted to obfuscate action with advice.

Say what you will about Margaret Thatcher—and many do—but she understood that leadership means picking a side and taking the flak.

Quoting Thatcher may cause involuntary groaning in some circles, but even her critics might admit: better a flawed decider than an indecisive saint.

The phrase endures not because of its author, but because of its brutal clarity. It encapsulates an ancient truth: power and accountability are indivisible. One may surround oneself with clever counsel, polished spreadsheets, and acronyms of truly Soviet complexity, but at the end of the day, someone has to say “yes” or “no.” That someone must own the consequences. In Westminster, that person is the minister. In biotech? It had better be the founder.

The Curse of the Overadvised

Biotech, like politics, is a field heavily populated by those who do not bear the consequences of their own recommendations. Scientific advisers. Regulatory consultants. Market access whisperers. Patent lawyers, platform specialists, brand strategists, and that guy from McKinsey who “just wants to have a coffee.” These people mean well. Some are brilliant. A few even return your emails within the same financial quarter. But they are not you.

They don’t lie awake wondering if your Phase II data should be cut by stratification or simply buried in a footnote. They don’t stare at cap tables like modernist art, trying to decipher whether Series B dilution is a virtue or a venereal disease. They don’t pitch, panic, or pray over the terminal value in a DCF model that’s basically a hallucination in Excel.

You do.

Yet founders often fall into the trap of worshipping at the altar of advice. They commission white papers and convene expert panels, holding “alignment meetings” like a corporate high priest casting out uncertainty. It's comforting. It is also cowardice masquerading as diligence.

Why Founders Must Decide

There is a peculiar burden in biotech. Unlike SaaS or, God forbid, fintech, our decisions don’t just cost time—they cost people. Approving the wrong trial design, botching a reimbursement dossier, or misjudging the strategic timing of an IPO has cascading effects beyond margin and morale. Your company may be trying to save lives, but it can’t afford to be run like a student union.

This means accepting that some decisions are gut-led, data-light, and morally messy. It means learning to distinguish between probabilistic modelling and political theatre. It means asking your advisers for advice, not absolution.

To paraphrase Thatcher in a mood of syntactical austerity:

$$\text{Decision} = \text{Advice} + \text{Judgment} + \text{Risk Acceptance}$$

Or more provocatively:

$$
\text{Founder Fitness} \propto \frac{1}{\text{Advisor Dependency}}
$$

Yes, advisers can sharpen your thinking. But too many of them, or too much reliance, and you're not leading a company—you’re chairing a roundtable of plausible deniability.

The Temptation of Diffusion

Why do we do it? Partly because biotech, like ancient Rome, reveres expert augury. But mostly because it’s easier to outsource risk than to own it. There is a risk-aversion syndrome endemic to early-stage innovation. We want certainty before clarity, validation before conviction, and approval before action.

This is dangerous. Inaction by consensus is still inaction. And in a capital cycle where dry powder is increasingly suspicious of burn rates, the founder who dithers will soon be outcompeted by the one who decides—flawed, perhaps, but fast.

The Thatcherian Biotech Founder

So let us reclaim this principle. Let us write it above the door of every boardroom and Slack channel: Advisers advise. Founders decide.

When the next pre-mortem begins with “our IP counsel advised…”—interrupt it. When someone suggests a task force to review what your own instincts already told you—shut it down. When your regulatory adviser says, “this might work in theory, but we’ve never done it that way”—do it anyway.

And when your lead VC leans across the boardroom table to ask, “Are you sure this is the right call?”—you look them in the eye and say:

“No. But it’s mine.”

A Parting Word

Leadership is not consensus-seeking. It is not facilitated workshops. It is not the average of multiple memos. It is the privilege—and curse—of choosing without knowing.

So go on. Be advised. Then decide.

And may Thatcher’s ghost haunt your inbox only when you're tempted to delegate courage.