Fifty-nine percent of business decision-makers say they’re planning to wait six to twelve months before committing to anything big.
That’s Columbia Bank’s 2026 Business Barometer, published a few weeks ago.
Here’s the number that actually matters, sitting right next to it. Sixty-three percent of those same decision-makers say investment, not cost-cutting, is their real priority right now.
Read those two numbers together and you get something strange. Most of these people want to move. Most of them are choosing not to.
The easy explanation is prudence. Markets are uncertain, so you wait, watch, gather more information before you commit real money.
I don’t buy it. Not entirely.
In 1993, IBM brought in an outsider to run the company for the first time in its history. Lou Gerstner had never worked in tech. He walked into a company people were seriously discussing breaking apart.
What he found wasn’t a strategy problem. It was a company organized into baronies.
Each division ran like its own small kingdom. They competed with each other. They hid things from each other.
Early on, Gerstner sent a message to the entire company. The head of IBM-Europe intercepted it before it reached his people.
He’d decided, on his own authority, that it wasn’t appropriate for his employees to see.
Gerstner found out. He called the man to headquarters and told him something simple: those employees work for IBM. Not for you.
There’s a second story from the same period. Gerstner would ask a senior executive for an analysis and get some version of “I’ll check with the team.” Once, twice, a pattern. He stopped accepting it, and started going straight to whoever was actually doing the work.
He also found that pay was tied to how each division performed on its own. Which was exactly the incentive that had built the baronies in the first place. He rewired it to total company performance.
None of what Gerstner found at IBM was caution.
An executive intercepting a company-wide email isn’t being careful. He’s deciding, quietly, that his territory matters more than the company that pays him.
Somebody stalling with “I’ll check with the team” three times in a row isn’t gathering more data. He’s avoiding the moment where he’d have to own the analysis he gives you.
I think the 59% waiting six to twelve months are doing a version of the same thing, dressed in more respectable language.
What’s broken isn’t caution.
It’s agenda, wearing caution’s clothes, because agenda gets you fired and “we’re being prudent” doesn’t.
Nobody stands up in a board meeting and says I’m protecting my own position. They say we’re being careful, and everyone nods, because careful is safe to say out loud and protecting your position isn’t.
So here’s the question worth sitting with, if you’ve got a decision on your desk right now that you’ve been calling careful.
Is it actually caution? Or is it something you’ve built that you’re not ready to admit might need to move.