Quotes About Decision-making

But you have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically—to say "no" to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger "yes" burning inside. The enemy of the "best" is often the "good.

Whether you go to the concert or stay and work is really a small part of an effective decision. You might make the same choice with a number of other centers. But there are several important differences when you are coming from a principle-centered paradigm. First, you are not being acted upon by other people or circumstances. You are proactively choosing what you determine to be the best alternative. You make your decision consciously and knowledgeably.

Management is a bottom line focus: How can I best accomplish certain things? Leadership deals with the top line: What are the things I want to accomplish? In the words of both Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

Do what is important rather than what is urgent.

Only when you have the self-awareness to examine your program—and the imagination and conscience to create a new, unique, principle-centered program to which you can say "yes"—only then will you have sufficient independent will power to say "no," with a genuine smile, to the unimportant.

If you wait to be acted upon, you will be acted upon. And growth and opportunity consequences attend either road.

Think carefully as you consider Quadrants I and III. It's easy to think because something is urgent, it's important. A quick way to differentiate between these two quadrants is to ask yourself if the urgent activity contributed to an important objective. If not, it probably belongs in Quadrant III.

Management is a bottom line focus: How can I best accomplish certain things? Leadership deals with the top line: What are the things I want to accomplish? In the words of both Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall. You

Organize and execute around priorities.

More than doing things right, it's focused on doing the right things.

REACTIVE LANGUAGE PROACTIVE LANGUAGE There's nothing I can do. Let's look at our alternatives. That's just the way I am. I can choose a different approach. He makes me so mad. I control my own feelings. They won't allow that. I can create an effective presentation.

But one of the executives was proactive. He was driven by values, not feelings.

Because we are, by nature, proactive, if our lives are a function of conditioning and conditions, it is because we have, by conscious decision or by default, chosen to empower those things to control us.

We choose—either to live our lives or to let others live them for us.

PRINCIPLES OF PERSONAL MANAGEMENT Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least. GOETHE

While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of those actions. Consequences are governed by natural law. They are out in the Circle of Concern.

Either way—authoritarian or permissive—you have the golden egg mentality. You want to have your way or you want to

he can only answer to life by answering for his own life;

learned to focus on truly important things, not just urgent things.

Management is a bottom line focus: How can I best accomplish certain things? Leadership deals with the top line: What are the things I want to accomplish? In the words of both Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

As a principle-centered person, you try to stand apart from the emotion of the situation and from other factors that would act on you, and evaluate the options. Looking at the balanced whole—the work needs, the family needs, other needs that may be involved, and the possible implications of the various alternative decisions—you'll try to come up with the best solution, taking all factors into consideration.

To maintain the P/PC Balance, the balance between the golden egg (production) and the health and welfare of the goose (production capability) is often a difficult judgment call.

Guns might be called the hardware of this equation of violence. Emotions were the software—and just as important when deciding whether or not to pick up a firearm.

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.