Quotes About Decision-making

Grow slow and see what feels right—premature hiring is the death of many companies. And avoid huge growth spurts too—they can cause you to skip right over your appropriate size.

If all you do is work, you're unlikely to have sound judgments. Your values and decision making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what's worth extra effort and what's not. And you wind up just plain tired. No one makes sharp decisions when tired.

So let your latest grand ideas cool off for a while first. By all means, have as many great ideas as you can. Get excited about them. Just don't act in the heat of the moment. Write them down and park them for a few days. Then, evaluate their actual priority with a calm mind.

Which features you choose to include or omit have a lot to do with less software too. Don't be afraid to say no to feature requests that are hard to do. Unless they're absolutely essential, save time/effort/confusion by leaving them out. Slow down too. Don't take action on an idea for a week and see if it still seems like a great idea after the initial buzz wears off. The extra marinading time will often help your brain come up with an easier solution.

So sacrifice some of your darlings for the greater good. Cut your ambition in half. You're better off with a kick-ass half than a half-assed whole. Most

It's so easy to say yes. Yes to another feature, yes to an overly optimistic deadline, yes to a mediocre design. Soon, the stack of things you've said yes to grows so tall you can't even see the things you should really be doing. Start getting into the habit of saying no—even to many of your best ideas. Use the power of no to get your priorities straight. You rarely regret saying no. But you often wind up regretting saying yes.

Also, don't be timid about your conclusions. Sometimes abandoning what you're working on is the right move, even if you've already put in a lot of effort. Don't throw good time after bad work.

Say no by default If I'd listened to customers, I'd have given them a faster horse. —HENRY FORD It

It doesn't matter how much you plan, you'll still get some stuff wrong anyway. Don't make things worse by overanalyzing and delaying before you even get going. Long projects zap morale. The longer it takes to develop, the less likely it is to launch. Make the call, make progress, and get something out now—while you've got the motivation and momentum to do so.

If you work on A, can you still do B and C before April? If not, would you rather have B and C instead of A? If you're stuck on something for a long period of time, that means there are other things you're not getting done.

Questions you can wait hours to learn the answers to are fine to put in an email. Questions that require answers in the next few minutes can go into an instant message. For crises that truly merit a sky-is-falling designation, you can use that old-fashioned invention called the telephone. With

We're not very good when we're spending other people's money.

Lantech's reinvention intervention answers one of the most fundamental questions about embracing change: Whose idea wins? The answer, of course, is that the best idea should win—not the boss's idea, not the boss's kid's idea, not the strategy department's idea, not the old idea, not the competition's idea; only the best idea should win.

in an effort to stop the bleeding, in one fell swoop Schultz closed one thousand underperforming stores, eliminated seven thousand positions, revised the business plan downward to numbers they could hit, and embraced radical change and began making a dizzying series of small bets.

Make as many small bets as you have people responsible for making them happen and sufficient financial resources to maximize the odds of success. If there aren't enough resources to give the small bet a chance, you'll never know if it might have worked out or been a possible home run.

Hackett found that leaders at "above average" companies are surprisingly different in this critical measure. They identify an average of just twenty-one priorities instead of 372. Editing the list isn't easy, but the payoff is huge. Time and money get tightly focused on the crucial activities that drive the firm's competitive advantage, and everyone has a clearer idea what to do and no problem deciding who's accountable.

Arrow doesn't allow that kind of "home office knows best" bureaucracy that kills momentum. "The people that run a business really know that business. We execute better because we push activities and decisions down to them," Long explains. "I believe our success is because the people we acquired in the deal all feel they are a part of it.

After twenty years of systematic observation I've decided the most common mistake is for one to get stuck on the "plains of hesitation." The plains of hesitation are a metaphorical place where the best laid plans and good intentions expire.

Executives at Walmart did just as Welch had suggested, disciplining themselves and their suppliers to work on "price-based costing" instead of "cost-based pricing." By ruthlessly rethinking, reengineering, and reinventing every little decision in every link of their supply chain, Sam Walton and his team created innovative new business models that delivered customers a much better deal.

When companies haphazardly throw money at what they perceive their problems, challenges, and opportunities to be, the real answers that could solve the real problems or allow them to embrace radical change and take advantage of the real opportunities are seldom found.

He saw his judgments as "something you polish." You look for confirming evidence and get tunnel vision. Judgments close your mind in dynamic situations, and you miss important but subtle bits of information that are critical to success. In many instances Gleason believed that if the leader made sense he could let go and have the crews make their own decisions.

Todo el mundo obliga a todo el mundo, no tanto a hacer lo que no quiere, sino más bien lo que no sabe si quiere, porque casi nadie sabe lo que no quiere, y menos aún, lo que quiere

The goal shouldn't be to remove interpretation or judgment. It should be to make judgments thoughtfully, and once made, to have them be transparent and discussable.

Why is it so difficult to decide whether to avoid or to confront? Because at some level we know the truth: If we try to avoid the problem, we'll feel taken advantage of, our feelings will fester, we'll wonder why we don't stick up for ourselves, and we'll rob the other person of the opportunity to improve things.