Why I Asked My Marketing Manager To Resign
Almost ten years ago, I hired a dedicated marketing manager.
The investment was significant. His salary. The associated costs. And a meaningful marketing budget to spend on top of that.
We got to the end of his first 12 months and I sat down with the numbers.
The spend was up substantially.
The top-line revenue increase was not proportionate.
Not even close.
I brought it to him directly.
His response is one I’ve never forgotten.
“Imagine how much less the revenue increase would be if we hadn’t spent the money.”
It won’t come as a surprise that I encouraged him to resign a few weeks later.
But the bigger lesson wasn’t about him.
It was about the trap he’d fallen into.
Negative justification.
It’s the moment you take an investment that didn’t perform - money, time, energy, effort, attention - and instead of confronting the gap honestly, you reframe it.
“It would’ve been worse if I hadn’t.”
“It could’ve been so much more terrible.”
“Imagine what would’ve happened without it.”
On the surface, it sounds reasonable. It’s even structured like analysis.
But it isn’t analysis.
It’s protection.
It protects you from acknowledging that the investment didn’t return what it was supposed to.
It protects your decision-making from scrutiny.
It protects your ego from accountability.
And it does all of that while quietly killing your ability to make better decisions next time.
Because negative justification removes the requirement for the investment to perform.
There’s no benchmark.
No floor.
No measurable expectation.
Just an imagined alternative reality where things would’ve been worse, and a current reality you don’t have to defend.
The danger isn’t that you tell yourself this story once.
It’s that you start telling it about everything.
The hire that isn’t working.
The strategy that isn’t delivering.
The relationship that isn’t healthy.
The effort that isn’t producing results.
Every one of them gets the same protective coat of paint.
“Imagine if I hadn’t…”
That’s the slippery slope.
And once you’re on it, it’s extremely hard to step off.
The antidote is simple, even if it isn’t easy.
Hold every investment to the standard you set when you made it.
If it performed, celebrate it.
If it didn’t, confront it honestly. Learn from it. Adjust.
But never let yourself off the hook by inventing a worse version of reality that didn’t happen.
Because the version of reality that did happen is the only one you can actually learn from.
If you know someone who would benefit from reading this, please forward it to them. It may change the trajectory of their life for the better, and the catalyst could be you.
