Quotes About Decision-making

Effective leaders strike the right balance between doing (making things happen) and being (observing and reflecting).

The results of this diagnostic exercise should help you answer the following questions: in what spheres do you most enjoy solving problems?

They become overly fixated on wringing insights out of data that just aren't there, or setting up entirely new information systems, rather than focusing on the information at their disposal and what it really suggests about strategic priorities.

So it shouldn't come as a complete surprise that the decision-making game becomes that much more bruising and politically charged the higher up you go. It's critical, then, for you to become more effective at building and sustaining alliances and for you to become expert in corporate diplomacy.

Negotiate time lines for diagnosis and action planning. Don't let yourself get caught up immediately in firefighting or be pressured to make calls before you're ready. Buy yourself some time, even if it's only a few weeks, to diagnose the new organization and come up with an action plan.

leaders strike the right balance between doing (making things happen) and being (observing and reflecting).

The style conversation. This conversation is about how you and your new boss can best interact on an ongoing basis. What forms of communication does he prefer, and for what? Face-to-face? Voice, electronic? How often? What kinds of decisions does he want to be consulted on, and when can you make the call on your own? How do your styles differ, and what are the implications for the ways you should interact?

coping with increasing issue breadth and complexity requires leaders to rethink how and what they delegate each time they get promoted.

Consciously or unconsciously, you may choose to delay by burying yourself in other work or fool yourself into believing that the time isn't ripe to make the call. The result is what leadership thinkers have termed work avoidance: the tendency to avoid taking the bull by the horns, which results in tough problems becoming even tougher.1

Managers at lower levels lack the perspective and the confidence to maintain a strategy. There will be constant pressures to compromise, relax trade-offs, and emulate rivals. One of the leader's jobs is to teach others in the organization about strategy—and to say no. Strategy

Some managers mistake "customer focus" to mean they must serve all customer needs or respond to every request from distribution channels.

The result is the Strategy Paradox: strategies with the greatest possibility of success also have the greatest possibility of failure. Resolving this paradox requires a new way of thinking about strategy and uncertainty.

Knowing when not to take an item, however deflating, is mandatory for a thief expecting career longevity.

It takes more than knowing how to point the ship to be a captain," he said with more than a touch of black choler. "It takes knowing where and why to point it.

Cornelius Fudge

What we're doing now is we're saying that individual schools can spend the money on their own priorities, so that head teachers can decide what's truly important, because the big shift in approach on education that we're taking - which is different from what happened before - is that we trust teachers and we trust heads.

Physical proximity, of course, facilitates the common education of the affects, but also essential are the intense experiences of cooperation, the creation of mutual security in a situation of extreme vulnerability, and the collective deliberation and decision-making processes. The encampments are a great factory for the production of social and democratic affects.

We make our own rules and lose by them.

The Godfather, Part III (1990): Vincent Mancini: Don Lucchesi, you are a man of finance and politics. These things I don't understand. Don Lucchesi: You understand guns? Vincent Mancini: Yes. Don Lucchesi: Finance is a gun. Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger.

I owned a Ferrari, a Range Rover, a Mercedes 560SL convertible, a Jeep Cherokee and a Nissan 300ZX. I can't remember the intricate decision tree I had to climb in order to determine which one to drive to work on any given day - it probably had something to do with the weather, or which car had more gas in the tank, or upholstery that best matched whatever shirt I happened to throw on that morning.

What remains under consideration is how Cincinnatus, the early Republic, and the other examples, cultures, and structures of governance will be considered in future decisions of how human beings will live in a globally connected commercial, technological, and cultural world.

Historians who carefully examined the events and details behind the disasters of the Titanic, the Challenger, and the Bay of Pigs have determined a common thread: the inability or unwillingness of participants and leaders to raise questions about their concerns. Some group members were fearful that they were the only one who had a particular concern (when, in fact, it was later discovered that many people in the group had similar concerns).

However, once you realize the answer to most questions is, "It depends," you are ready to embark on the quest to figure out what it depends on.

Researcher Ray Christian sheds some light on the possible role of the unconscious in decision making. He notes that what we perceive at any given moment—our conscious bandwidth—is an extremely small subset of the information stream flowing to the sense organs. Specifically, he estimates that the capacity of our sensory system is 11 megabits per second while our conscious bandwidth is just 16 bits per second.10