Quotes About Decision-making

No. This would be better as a team. She dragged her top drawer open, rooted out her aspirin. I should have fired her weeks ago. You were right about that. I was wrong. I need to write this down. Can I borrow a pencil? Shut up. Grateful that his easy calm steadied her, she heaved a breath, then twisted open a bottle of water. Tell me straight out, Ty, what you think of the centennial campaign

She left the house and climbed into her pickup, telling herself she would handle whatever needed to be handled.

He was the kind of boy any young girl should date while she's still able to recover.

A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

Your problem, my darling daughter, is that you're afraid you're going to miss something. But what you don't realize is that, by not making a decision, you're missing it all.

Dê uma boa olhada nas suas escolhas antes de culpar metade do mundo pelos seus erros.

To succeed consistently, good managers need to be skilled not just in choosing, training, and motivating the right people for the right job, but in choosing, building, and preparing the right organization for the job as well.

People often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this…is like driving a car looking only at the rearview mirror-because data is only available about the past.

But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think. He then reached a bold decision about what to do, on his own.

There had, therefore, to be a reason why good managers consistently made wrong decisions when faced with disruptive technological change.

the innovator's dilemma: Should we invest to protect the least profitable end of our business, so that we can retain our least loyal, most price-sensitive customers? Or should we invest to strengthen our position in the most profitable tiers of our business, with customers who reward us with premium prices for better products?

In the early stage, managers are puzzle solvers, not number crunchers. Passive

As such, while senior managers may think they're making the resource allocation decisions, many of the really critical resource allocation decisions have actually been made long before senior management gets involved: Middle managers have made their decisions about which projects they'll back and carry to senior management—and which they will allow to languish.

The second source of options is unanticipated—usually a cocktail of problems and opportunities that emerges while you are trying to implement the deliberate plan or strategy that you have decided upon. At Honda, what was unanticipated were the problems with the big bikes, the costs associated with fixing them, and the opportunity to sell the little Super Cub motorbikes.

innovator's dilemma: Should we invest to protect the least profitable end of our business, so that we can retain our least loyal, most price-sensitive customers? Or should we invest to strengthen our position in the most profitable tiers of our business, with customers who reward us with premium prices for better products?

If we can't see beyond what's close by, we're relying on chance—on the currents of life—to guide us. Good theory helps people steer to good decisions—not just in business, but in life, too.

While some people will argue that you should always have the next five years of your life planned out, others have followed a strategy of just seeing what has come along and will tell you that it's worked well for them.

How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources? The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward.

As you're living your life from day to day, how do you make sure you're heading in the right direction? Watch where your resources flow. If they're not supporting the strategy you've decided upon, then you're not implementing that strategy at all.

The resource allocation process determines which deliberate and emergent initiatives get funded and implemented, and which are denied resources.

As difficult as it may seem, you've got to be honest with yourself about this whole process. Change can often be difficult, and it will probably seem easier to just stick with what you are already doing. That thinking can be dangerous. You're only kicking the can down the road, and you risk waking up one day, years later, looking into the mirror, asking yourself: What am I doing with my life?

The basis of product choice often evolves from functionality to reliability, then to convenience, and, ultimately, to price.

If you give in to "just this once," based on a marginal-cost analysis, you'll regret where you end up. That's the lesson I learned: it's easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time.

Real life is disobliging. People like to think, or feel, in black and white. Having to assess the relative values of all those intermediate greys is tiresome and perplexing.