BAD CALL

Decision autopsies for people who know better.

Most organizations don’t fail because of one catastrophic mistake made by a fool.

They fail because of a sequence of reasonable-seeming decisions made by smart, experienced, well-resourced people — each one individually defensible, each one making the next harder to question, until the outcome that seemed unthinkable becomes the one that was nearly inevitable.

That pattern has a name. It has a structure. And once you can see it clearly, you see it everywhere.

What Bad Call Is

Bad Call is a decision intelligence brief that reconstructs those sequences. Not to assign blame. Not to celebrate hindsight. To show precisely where the thinking went wrong, what was driving it beneath the stated rationale, and what a cleaner version of the same decision would have looked like.

Each issue takes one organization — a company, a board, a leadership team, an investment group — and runs it through a structured analytical framework built around the forces that distort consequential decisions. The framework isn’t theoretical. It’s been built and tested against some of the most expensive decision failures of the last thirty years, and refined through decades of sitting inside the kinds of decisions this publication dissects.

The structure of every issue is fixed and deliberate: the situation as it appeared at the time, what was actually driving it, where the distortion entered and why, what a clean version would have looked like, and one idea the reader can carry into the room on Monday.

No long introductions. No storytelling for its own sake. No frameworks you already know dressed up as new insight. The structure is the product.

Who It’s For

Bad Call is written for people who make consequential calls for a living. Founders. Board members. Senior operators. Advisors. People who can’t afford to let bias, noise, accumulation, and misaligned incentives quietly run their judgment off the road.

Bad Call doesn’t work for everyone. It’s not supposed to.

If you’re the right reader you’ll know within two issues.

Who Writes It

Bad Call is written by RC — an operator and advisor with decades of experience inside the kinds of organizations and decisions this publication dissects. The framework came from watching smart people make predictable mistakes in real time, trying to name what was happening before it compounded, and occasionally failing to make the naming stick.

The analysis comes from someone who has been in the room. The point of view is direct. The writing is attributed.

What the Framework Looks Like in Practice

In banking circles, there’s a term for a particular kind of technology solution. RFOP. Rooms Full Of People. The product works — it just works because of the humans operating it, not because of the technology being sold. The pitch is automation. The reality is sneakers.

Olive AI raised $850 million, reached a $4 billion valuation, and deployed across 900 hospitals. In October 2023 it shut down completely. The gap between what was being sold and what was being delivered had been visible in the renewal data for years. Every function read the same signal differently. Nobody had a framework that forced a common answer.

Nobody decided to build a fraudulent company. The incentive structure made selling the gap the path of least resistance at every stage — and organizations, like water, find that path without being directed toward it.

Three cognitive biases compounded in sequence, each one making the last harder to reverse. By the time the data became unambiguous, the accumulation of misdirected commitments had made honest correction nearly impossible.

That’s what Bad Call does. Not the headline. The mechanism. Not what happened. Why it was nearly inevitable — and what a cleaner version would have looked like.

On Price

Bad Call is a paid publication, priced to reflect the value of what it delivers rather than the volume of what it produces. One issue per week. No filler, no padding, no content for content’s sake.

A 30-day satisfaction guarantee applies to all new subscriptions. If it isn’t what you expected, contact RC directly within 30 days.

Founding memberships — In The Room — are available in limited quantity for those who want permanent access and a direct line to the thinking behind the analysis. There are 25. That number won’t change.

Bad Call publishes every other Tuesday.

Because it always seemed fine at the time.

— RC