Quotes About Decision-making

The training, decision-making wise, should be harder than the game,' says Wayne Smith. 'So you try an overlying principle of throwing problems at them – unexpected events – forcing them to solve the problems.

General Lee said that the attack of his right was not made as early as expected,—which he should not have said. He knew that I did not believe that success was possible; that care and time should be taken to give the troops the benefit of positions and the grounds; and he should have put an officer in charge who had more confidence in his plan. Two-thirds of the troops were of other commands, and there was no reason for putting the assaulting forces under my charge.

Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof it is temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.

No decision-making system is going to guarantee corporate success. The strategic decisions that corporations have to make are of mind-numbing complexity. But we know that the more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made.

If small groups are included in the decision-making process, then they should be allowed to make decisions. If an organization sets up teams and then uses them for purely advisory purposes, it loses the true advantage that a team has: namely, collective wisdom.

Independence is important to intelligent decision making for two reasons. First, it keeps the mistakes that people make from becoming correlated. Errors in individual judgment won't wreck the group's collective judgment as long as those errors aren't systematically pointing in the same direction. One of the quickest ways to make people's judgments systematically biased is to make them dependent on each other for information.

Successful program management is about choosing a right pathway and owning the advantages and disadvantages of the chosen path, because in the real world the optimal or perfect path doesn't exist.

There is something about the call to sacrificial love that finally removes any claim to superiority, any claim to priority in decision-making, any claim to special honor. The same vision finally led, in the nineteenth century, not only to the "humanization" of the slave trade but to the recognition that slavery itself was fundamentally incompatible with the worship of a God who "shows no partiality.

El temor por nuestras propias vidas pudo habernos inducido a llevarlo al patíbulo y ponerle la soga al cuello, pero fue necesario un ímpetu más urgente que nos hiciera continuar y darle una patada a la silla.

changing the plan at the last moment. "Oh, come on. The chicken can wait. Can't it? Sure it can." He was talking a mile a minute. "You can put the other thing back

Hit the ground running; consolidate control; ask questions of everyone wherever you go; manage by wandering around; determine the basic problems of each organization and hit them head-on; when attacked, counterattack; stick to your guns; spend your political capital to reach your goals; and then when your work is stymied or done, find a way out.

It was Andrew Jackson's motto, he reminded, that "if you temporize, you are lost.

if ever an argument can be made for the conclusive importance of the character and intelligence of the leader in fraught times, at home and abroad, it will come to rest on the broad shoulders of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Still, Roosevelt noted, it was "not always easy to strike the just middle," and he inevitably made mistakes.

faith never foundered that if the people "were taken into the confidence of their government and received a full and truthful statement of what was happening, they would generally choose the right course.

A finely developed sense of timing—knowing when to wait and when to act—would remain in Lincoln's repertoire of leadership skills the rest of his life.

He questioned if leadership success could be obtained by attaching oneself to a series of titled positions. If a person focused too much on a future that could not be controlled, he would become, Roosevelt acknowledged, too "careful, calculating, cautious in word and act.

He questioned if leadership success could be obtained by attaching oneself to a series of titled positions. If a person focused too much on a future that could not be controlled, he would become, Roosevelt acknowledged, too "careful, calculating, cautious in word and act." Thereafter, he would jettison long-term career calculations and focus simply on whatever job opportunity came his way, assuming it might be his last.

Roosevelt's leadership style was, in actuality, governed by just such a series of simple dictums and aphorisms: Hit the ground running; consolidate control; ask questions of everyone wherever you go; manage by wandering around; determine the basic problems of each organization and hit them head-on; when attacked, counterattack; stick to your guns; spend your political capital to reach your goals; and then when your work is stymied or done, find a way out.

One escapes; but one always has to come back. I found too I disliked not being in command of myself.

In order to rule, one must face reality.

You lead, therefore you kill.

After all, he thinks conscience is a sort of vermiform appendix. Chop it out and you'll feel all the better.

Think of it—all ours, to do as we like with, for as Harold Skimpole so rightly observes, £60 saved is £60 gained, and I'd reckoned on spending it all.