Quotes About Decision-making

Cultivating debate, argument, dialogue, and disagreement—all this takes time, resulting in a slower decision-making process than just issuing an executive order. But it also increases the probability of choosing a wise course of action.

Washington cultivated a culture of open dialogue, practicing his famous self-discipline of silence, encouraging arguments to compete, listening and probing, until he made up his mind to act.

If you must have more than one priority, then keep it to a maximum of three—any more than three priorities is an admission that you don't really have any priorities.

good-to-great companies did not focus principally on what to do to become great; they focused equally on what not to do and what to stop doing.

The difference is simply this: A micro-manager doesn't trust his people, and seeks to control every single detail and decision; he believes that ultimately only he will make the right choices. A personal-touch leader, on the other hand, trusts his people to make basically good choices; he respects their abilities.

Most companies (we believe that most organizations do indeed lack clarity of vision) let crises, firefights, and tactical decisions drive the company. We refer to this as "tactics-driving strategy." Vision should drive strategy and strategy, in turn, should drive tactics, not the other way around.

The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there. No, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it.

Indeed, one of the crucial elements in taking a company from good to great is somewhat paradoxical. You need executives, on the one hand, who argue and debate—sometimes violently—in pursuit of the best answers, yet, on the other hand, who unify fully behind a decision, regardless of parochial interests.

One of the greatest of human follies is that we think we know ourselves so well, that we know how we would act under any conditions, that we would under any circumstance 'do the right thing.' Well, as many have discovered, you don't really know what you'll do in the dark till the lights go out.

Wars are fought by teenagers, you realize that. They really ought to be fought by the politicians and old people who start these wars. (Interview with Don Swaim of CBS Radio-1986)

The pressures of command were clearly weighing on him. He had insufficient authority, but he was no longer sure he wanted more of it.

When a man is in command, he sits in a position where he cannot have friend or foe. Regular human relationships do not figure into it. So you can't worry about what people think of you, and you can't lie awake and have sleepless nights. The job of being in command is lonely by definition.

It was written that I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice—

We did what our people do all the time, we told ourselves something we did was right and we found a way to justify it, even though we knew it was wrong.

We did what people do all the time, we told ourselves something we did was right and we found a way to justify it, even though we knew it was wrong.

Uncertainty is not an indication of poor leadership; it underscores the need for leadership.

If you have an intuition of something but no hard evidence to back it up, you might kind of sort of go about putting that intuition into practice, because there's still some uncertainty if it's right or wrong.

Uncertainty is seen to retard investment independently of considerations of risk or expected return.

Companies don't like uncertainty; travelers don't like uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a permanent part of the leadership landscape. It never goes away.

You don't raise taxes in times of such uncertainty.

An entrepreneur must deal with more uncertainty than a professional with a well-defined role.

Whether baseball or football, we're tasked in front offices with making decisions under uncertainty. How do you corral that uncertainty in a way to make more consistently better decisions? That's very similar.

Limit Hold'em is the game for you if you bore easily and crave fast action. Conversely, in No Limit, the game will often slow to a halt when someone is faced with a big decision. That's uncommon in Limit games because all-in bets are rare.