Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu explains why ‘disciplined initiative’ is a corporate myth — ‘Worst of both worlds’

The corporate obsession with metrics and dashboards might be quietly killing your company's drive. While highly structured organisations offer comfortable predictability, Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu argued that they often breed a passive, “wait for instructions from the top” culture.

In these environments, Vembu said, an organisation's survival hinges on one fragile dependency: the C-suite never making a wrong turn. If top executives fail to set the exact right course, a perfectly metric-driven company will simply march efficiently into a dead end, completely lost, he noted.

“Highly metric driven orgs tend to produce the ‘wait for instructions from the top’ culture and there is more predictability and certainty in that culture. Unless the top always knows how to set the right course, the org can be lost,” he wrote in an X post.

Conversely, he said, “seize the initiative culture” is rarely neat or orderly. Vembu noted that such environments inherently feel chaotic, characterised by frequent internal disagreements and a persistent, gnawing feeling of being “not good enough.”

“In a chaotic initiative-driven culture, the external environment (market) may have to provide the occasional discipline,” the Zoho boss wrote.

This internal friction, he said, is a natural byproduct of high energy and ambition.

Vembu illustrated this dynamic with a common reality in the tech industry, noting that every smart programmer looks at another's code and thinks, “It s**ks, I can do better.”

In these high-initiative cultures, internal corporate structures do not dictate the boundaries. Instead, it is the external environment—the open market—that must occasionally step in to provide the necessary discipline.

Trap of squaring a circle

Corporate leadership often attempt to avoid this fundamental trade-off by engineering a hybrid model. However, Vembu warned that trying to mandate a “highly disciplined culture of seizing the initiative” is a guaranteed strategic misstep.

Noting that attempting to square a circle inevitably produces the worst of both worlds, he said it strips away the comforting predictability of a top-down, metric-driven system while simultaneously crushing the organic, argumentative energy required for true innovation.

Ultimately, Vembu said, businesses must choose their trade-off: “We can provide comfortable certainty but lose the initiative, or we can seize the initiative but keep feeling somewhat uncomfortable.”

In my experience, he wrote, “Trying to square this circle: ‘we will have a highly disciplined culture of seizing the initiative’ produces the worst of both worlds.”

Netizens react

Vembu's social media post drew significant attention online, as netizens flooded the comment section with examples such as Amazon's "Bias for Action" and "Disagree and Commit" principles to navigate this cultural tension.

“At Amazon the two principles that try to manage this exact tension are Bias for Action and Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit. Bias for Action pushes people to seize initiative instead of waiting for perfect clarity from the top.Have Backbone forces the disagreements to surface early and honestly then requires commitment once the decision is made,” a user commented.

Another said, “Firms that don't have a genuine Skip Level feedback system can't sustain a uniform culture. All boils down to how the boss is.. is he promoting self or his team. The rest all looks good on paper. The bigger the firm, the greater the disconnect between top mgmt with ground. Prove me otherwise!”

“The tell in a metric-driven org is what happens when someone raises a problem that makes their own number look worse. If that costs them anything, initiative is gone, and no amount of cultural language brings it back. The one fix I have seen hold is to separate the review of the number from the review of the person, so a dip becomes information rather than a verdict,” a netizen noted.

However, another said, “I think it should start with Seize the initiative culture and then move towards a metric-driven one. Can't keep running an org with chaos all the time, the workplace would not be good to work anymore.”

A tech founder commented: “I’ve found the sweet spot isn’t discipline vs initiative, it’s having enough discipline to let people run without creating chaos. Would take a little disagreement and discomfort over a culture where everyone waits for the next instruction.”