Quotes About Decision-making

I didn't want to come to L.A. without a plan. I was already dealing with my own indecision in Atlanta, so I didn't want to pick up and relocate and do the same thing in a different area.

Indecision and reveries are the anesthetics of constructive action.

Once Dwight Eisenhower makes up his mind, he's full of indecision.

I'm much more indecisive and a people-pleaser than someone who's willing to step into the firing line.

I can be indecisive about things - and the less important something is, the more indecisive I am.

I have told the PCB that I want total independence to work with a free mind and pick the best players, and they have assured me it will be done.

I've had a lot of experience in independent film, and about how to choose. You've got to be very discerning about where you put your five bucks, and where you cut and what you don't cut.

SAY NO AND WALK AWAY Staying focused is essential for getting projects done. Saying no is essential for staying focused. At the outset, will the project have the people and funds, including contingencies, needed to succeed? If not, walk away. Does an action contribute to achieving the goal in the box on the right? If not, skip it. Say no to monuments. No to untested technology. No to lawsuits. And so on. This can be difficult, particularly if your organization embraces a bias for action.

We therefore conclude that cost overrun has not decreased over time. Cost overrun today is in the same order of magnitude as it was ten, thirty or seventy years ago. If techniques and skills for estimating costs and avoiding cost overrun in transport infrastructure projects have improved over time, this does not show in the data. No learning seems to take place in this important and highly costly sector of public and private decision making.

KNOW THAT YOUR BIGGEST RISK IS YOU It's tempting to think that projects fail because the world throws surprises at us: price and scope changes, accidents, weather, new management—the list goes on. But this is shallow thinking.

Asking "Why?" can work only where people feel free to speak their minds and the decision makers really listen. "Many employees who worked on the Fire Phone had serious doubts about it," concluded the journalist and author Brad Stone, who has written definitive histories of Amazon, "but no one, it seemed, had been brave or clever enough to take a stand and win an argument with their obstinate leader.

Communicative and deliberative approaches work well as ideals and evaluative yardsticks for decision making, but they are quite defenceless in the face of power.

Heuristics are fast and frugal rules of thumb used to simplify complex decisions. The word has its origin in the ancient Greek word Eureka!, the cry of joy and satisfaction when one finds or discovers something.

The persistence of public officials varies inversely with the importance of the matter on which they are persisting.

There is something about inside information which seems to paralyse a man's reasoning powers.

Penelope came to the conclusion that marrying someone when you're in love with them was perhaps not such a good idea, netter to wait a few years (ten, twenty, thirty, never?) to see if you're still compatible after the passion has subsided and reality set in.

We make too many wrong mistakes.

I was in charge, but I made logic the boss.

The country [Canada] is not entitled to nine [Supreme Court] judges giving their own views; the country is entitled to nine judges giving their views after listening to the views of their eight other colleagues.

If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation will you prefer the grain to the vote?

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

If you decide that you're going to do only the things you know are going to work, you're going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table.

I would never say no to something the team wanted to do, but I might say yes to something the team didn't want to do. You want there to be multiple ways to get to 'yes' because you want to encourage risk-taking.

Do nothing rashly; want of circumspection is the chief cause of failure and disaster. Fortune, wise lover of the wise, selects him for her lord who ere he acts reflects.