Effective leadership requires forward thinking, structured decision making, and a willingness to bring others into the process. Rick Williams, keynote speaker, board director, and author, goes further. For him, a leader’s primary responsibility is to intentionally shape the organization’s future through the choices made each day. “Your most important leadership job is to create the future by the decisions you make today,” he says. It is a principle at the heart of his book Create the Future and one that echoes throughout his work guiding CEOs, board members, and leadership teams.
Rick Williams has spent a career helping leaders steer through uncertainty, weighing hard choices and emerging with a clearer sense of purpose. As a physicist turned company founder, board chair, management consultant, and bestselling author, Williams has lived the pressures that sit on a leader’s shoulders. His message is this: leadership is an act of creation.
“Leadership isn’t about managing the present. It’s about creating tomorrow,” he explains. Leaders who are not looking two, three, even five years ahead unknowingly surrender their role. Without a deliberate and forward-looking view, they simply “follow yesterday’s momentum.”
Creating the future, Williams says, is the sum of concrete decisions made consistently over time. Leaders shape the long-term trajectory of their companies through thoughtful choices that align with a clear vision.
The Real Work: Making Difficult Decisions
Williams knows the pressure that comes with high-stakes decisions. His decades advising CEOs, chairing boards, and guiding early stage companies have shown him how tough the decision-making process becomes when risk and opportunity intertwine.
“Making decisions, difficult decisions, is hard to do. It’s hard to get it right,” he says. Decisions often require tradeoffs that expose a leader’s priorities. Growth versus stability. Innovation versus risk. Long-term strategy versus short-term expectations. These choices, Williams notes, define a company’s destiny.
In Create the Future, he outlines practical frameworks for confronting these decisions with clarity. Leaders must understand the issues at hand, evaluate risks against their values, and articulate which outcomes matter most. It requires understanding not only what you want to achieve but the risks you are willing to accept to get there.
Why Leaders Should Not Decide Alone
Despite a strong emphasis on decisiveness, Williams warns against the lone-hero model of leadership. “Seek out new ideas and different opinions,” he says. “After all, you might be wrong.”
Williams has seen organizations thrive when leaders invite their teams, board members, and advisors into the decision-making process. Diverse perspectives often reveal blind spots and spark creative solutions, and collaboration helps to build trust — a crucial factor when implementing decisions that impact everyone.
Boards are among the most powerful yet underutilized assets a company has. A well-structured board is a value accelerator, offering strategic guidance, challenge, and accountability. Williams’s own board experience across medtech, finance, and technology sectors has shaped his belief that boards should be active partners rather than compliance bodies.
He encourages leaders to use their boards not only as overseers but as thought partners who help shape the future of the organization. That means bringing them into the hard conversations early, being transparent about risks, and listening to expertise that comes from outside day-to-day operations.
Choosing the Future with Optimism
Williams has been a physicist launching optical systems into space, an early stage company founder navigating the realities of entrepreneurship, a consultant guiding government agencies, and a sailor mastering lessons of teamwork and trust on the open ocean.
Across all these roles, one truth has remained constant: the future is shaped by the decisions leaders make today. “You create the future with the decisions you make,” he says. It is both an empowering and sobering reminder. For him, leadership is about intention, discipline, and the willingness to learn. Leaders who embrace decision-making as their core responsibility position their organizations to thrive, no matter the uncertainty ahead.
To learn more about Williams’s work, connect with him on LinkedIn and his website: www.RickWilliamsLeadership.com
