Quotes About Decision-making

Since one's moral identity is socially constructed, one must always be prepared to justify -both to others and oneself- why one chose one course of action over another. Justification means showing that my actions actually emanated from values that we all share.

The leader's checklist for General Electric, for instance, according to those highly familiar with the company, includes teaching others how to lead their divisions, making tough—often wrenching—personnel decisions around performance, and continually innovating. A checklist for Google, by contrast, would place greater emphasis on the individual pursuit of creative sparks, keeping teams small, and guiding others in an even-keeled manner.

These classic Donchian trading rules were first published over 75 years ago: General Guides Beware of acting immediately on

One of the biggest mistakes most investors make is believing they've always got to be doing something . . . the trick in investing is not to lose money . . . the losses will kill you. They ruin your compounding rate; and compounding is the magic of investing.

You can't be a trader when you're right and an investor when you're wrong. That's how you lose.

Bannon, Kushner, Conway, and the president's daughter actually had no specific responsibilities—they could make it up as they went along. They did what they wanted.

And it was not only calls from friends worried about him, but staffers calling people to call him and say Simmer down. "Who do you have in there?" said Joe Scarborough in a frantic call. "Who's the person you trust? Jared? Who can talk you through this stuff before you decided to act on it?" "Well," said the president, "you won't like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself.

Trump usually avoided: he had no interest in personnel problems, since they put the emphasis on other people.

Here was a perfect example of an essential Trump paradigm: he acceded to anyone who seemed to know more about any issue he didn't care about, or simply one whose details he couldn't bring himself to focus on closely. Great! he would say, punctuating every statement with a similar exclamation and regularly making an effort to jump from his chair. On the spot, Trump eagerly agreed to let Ryan run the health care bill and to make Price the Health and Human Services secretary.

Jim Baker, chief of staff for both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and almost everybody's model for managing the West Wing, advised Priebus not to take the job.

Who can talk you through this stuff before you decided to act on it?" "Well," said the president, "you won't like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself.

this was the fundamental hypothesis of the senior staff, shared by Walsh and everyone else: Trump must know what he was doing, his intuition must be profound.

Bypassing lawyers, regulators, and the agencies and personnel responsible for enforcing it, President Trump—with Bannon's low, intense voice behind him, offering a rush of complex information—signed what was put in front of him.

Trump quite profoundly seemed unable to distinguish between his political advantage and his personal needs—he thought emotionally, not strategically.

David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest.

The issue was not that he might act precipitously and recklessly because he didn't understand the consequences of doing so. The issue was that he could not comprehend the actual choices that needed to be made in order to act; indeed, he could not even stay in the room long enough to decide on a course of action. For Trump, the fog of war would waylay him before the first command could be given.

His advisers didn't know whether he was an isolationist or a militarist, or whether he could distinguish between the two.

In politics, the smart move is not to say no and to know how to finesse yes.

It was the chaos of just doing things that actually got things done. Except, even if you assumed that not knowing how to do things didn't much matter if you just did them, it was still not clear who was going to do what you wanted to do.

The President didn't seem to realize that in order to make sound decisions there needed to be at least one adult in the room.

he thought emotionally, not strategically.

Almost everybody in the White House followed Trump's thinking by tracking whom he had called the night before.)

The Best and the Brightest. (One of the

The Best and the Brightest