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90% of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reason for supporting our predilections.

High office teaches decision-making not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.

A decision is the action an executive must take when he has information so incomplete that the answer does not suggest itself.

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Emotions get decision-making started, presenting the conscious, logical mind with a short list of possibilities. Without at least a little intuition, then, the decision process never leaves the gate.

The problem with the way we teach is that if a student makes a comment in class that isn't grounded in the data in the case, the instructor is trained to crucify her right on the spot. And so we exalt the virtues of data-driven decision making. And then many of the students go to work for consulting firms where they carry data-driven analytical decision making to an nth degree. Thus, in many ways, the whole teaching model condemns managers to act after the game is over. Maybe you can't teach intuition, but maybe you can.

It's better to choose and to choose wrongly than not to choose at all. Fence-sitters of this world have the worst of every fate.

If I had one wish, it is to see organizations dedicating some effort to study their own decision processes and their own mistakes, and to keep track so as to learn from those mistakes. I think this isn't happening. I can see a lot of factors acting against the possibility of that happening. But if I had to pick one thing, that would be it.

I don't think the issue is too much information. More important is decision overload. We believe that every person, or organization, can only make so many competent decisions in a given amount of time. Up until the point that we change our biology, there are some fixed limits on the speed by which we individually process information. However, there are enormously powerful tools by which we can extend the amount and extend the capacity of, for example, how information is organized. The simplest example is our telephone numbers. Why do they come in a grouping of three and four instead of just throwing all seven at you. It's because you can't remember seven very easily, but you can remember three and four. That's a primitive example of what might be called chunking information. We can handle more information if we can chunk it, and we can chunk it at higher and higher levels of complexity, and we can employ better models of organizing information. If you have powerful models, you can just handle a lot more.

It can be proved through experiments that people are not conscious of the reasons why they make a decision...People do not know what has influenced their decision and often invent reasons for their choice afterward. Only a small part of decision making reaches the conscious mind, while most decision making, just as most thinking, is below this threshold of consciousness. You know what you are thinking, but you do not know why you are thinking it.

...I run experiments both with experienced managers and with university students. Overall, the students do much better. It's always the same story: People are guided too much by little-understood experience and make the wrong generalizations. Less experience can be advantageous when it forces you to think harder.

History shows that CEOs who dither over tough decisions cause companies to get stuck in adversity and, ultimately, to drift into crisis...The secret appears to be to "get on with it": The game is won in the long term based on successful execution of a strategy, even a flawed one.

We haven't done a good job of teaching critical thinking and creative problem-solving. People find critical thinking difficult because it's a radical switch from their 20 years of education in solving well-structured problems. We've produced a nation of certainty junkies, where if you can't define a problem with precision and certainty, people go crazy. Well, welcome to the real world. The game has changed. Problems change as fast as you're working on them. Indeed, they change because you're working on them-or not working on them.

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.

Courage is the human virtue that counts most--courage to act on limited knowledge and insufficient evidence. That's all any of us have.

Decisions are rich events. Your values get expressed through your decisions. Decisions communicate your priorities to everyone (including you!).

Business thinking starts with an intuitive choice of assumptions. Its progress as analysis is intertwined with intuition. The final choice is always intuitive. If that were not true, all problems of almost any kind would be solved by mathematicians with nonquantitative data.

The final choice in all business decision is, of course, intuitive. It must be. Otherwise it is not a decision, just a conclusion, a printout.

The tradeoff of subjective nonquantifiable values is by definition a subjective and intuitive choice. Intuition can be awesome in its value at times. It is known as good judgment in everyday affairs. Intuition is in fact the subconscious integration of all the experiences, conditioning and knowledge of a lifetime, including the emotional and cultural biases of that lifetime.

But intuition alone is never enough. Alone it can be disastrously wrong. Analysis too can be disastrously wrong. Analysis depends upon keeping the required data to manageable proportions. It also means keeping the nonquantifiable data to a minimum. Thus analysis by its very nature requires initial oversimplification and intuitive choice of starting assumptions with exclusion of certain data. All of these choices are intuitive. A mistake in any one can be fatal to the analysis.

...When the results of analysis and intuition coincide, there is little gained except confidence. When the analysis reaches conclusions that are counterintuitive, then more rigorous analysis and reexamination of underlying assumptions are always called for. The expansion of the frame of reference and the increased rigor of analysis may be fruitful.

...Intuition disguised as status, seniority and rank is the underlying normative mode of all business decisions. It could not be otherwise. Too many choices must be made too often. Data is expensive to collect, often of uncertain quality or relevance. Analysis is laborious and often far too expensive even though imprecise or superficial.

...The first definition of a problem is inescapably intuitive. It must be in order to be recognized as a problem at all. The final decision is intuitive. It must be or there is no choice and therefore no need for decision.

Between those two points of beginning and ending, the rigorous process must take place. The sequence is analysis, problem redefinition, reanalysis and then even more rigorous problem redefinition, etc. until the law of diminishing returns dictates a halt intuitively.

So much of what we hear and what we're taught turns out to be false on closer scrutiny. Whether it is expert advice, what you read in the paper, or what your mother told you, if it is important, take the time to figure out for yourself whether it is really true.

Isn't stress the real test of personal and corporate values? The instant decisions executives make under pressure reveal the most about personal and corporate character.

Decision...is an act of imagination, it is a choice amongst the products of imagination. ...decision is wholly concerned with the future. Thus, decision cannot be choice of facts.

The capacity of human mind for formulating and solving complex problems is very small compared to the size of the problems whose solution is required for objectively rational behavior in the real world - even for a reasonable approximation to such objective rationality.

The final act of business judgment is of course intuitive. Â…. But the big work behind business judgement is in finding and acknowledging the facts and circumstances concerning technology, the market, and the like in their continuously changing forms.

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

We are given one life and the decision is ours whether to wait for circumstances to make up our mind or whether to act, and in acting, to live.

When it comes to innovation,business has much to learn from design. The philosophy in design shops is, 'try it, prototype it, and improve it'. Designers learn by doing. The style of thinking in traditional firms is largely inductive - proving that something actually operates - and deductive - proving that something must be. Design shops add abductive reasoning to the fray - which involves suggesting that something may be, and reaching out to explore it. Designers may not be able to prove that something is or must be, but they nevertheless reason that it may be, and this style of thinking is critical to the creative process. Whereas the dominant attitude in traditional firms is to see constraints as the enemy and budgets as the drivers of decisions, in design firms, the mindset is "nothing can't be done for sure," and constraints only increase the excitement level.

Contrary to popular belief, your decisions don't drive your long term success - your decisiveness does. Said another way, when you reach a crossroads on any issue, the act of choosing creates power, not the choice itself. The issue is momentum. No matter what you choose, when you commit boldly with conviction, you create momentum. When you hesitate you don't. And success is built on momentum.

Even in companies respected for their decisiveness, there can be ambiguity over who is accountable for which decisions. As a result, the entire decision-making process can stall, usually at one of four bottlenecks: global versus local, center versus business unit, function versus function, and inside versus outside partners.

...Cross-functional decisions too often result in ineffective compromise solutions, which frequently need to be revisited because the right people were not involved at the outset.

Facts and evidence are great levelers of hierarchy. Evidence-based practice changes power dynamics, replacing formal authority, reputation, and intuition with data. This means that senior leaders - often venerated for their wisdom and decisiveness - may lose some stature as their intuitions are replaced, at least at times, by judgments based on data available to virtually any educated person. The implication is that leaders need to make a fundamental decision: Do they want to be told they are always right, or do they want to lead organizations that actually perform well?

Confronting doubt involves coming to terms with differences in values. How does one choose between two valued objectives: safety versus liberty, scientific discovery versus the sanctity of human life, individuals versus groups? Sometimes we overcome doubt with faith, sometimes we privilege one set of values over another. And sometimes we just live with the burden of making choices when there are no easy answers.

People tend to overvalue advice when the problem they're addressing is hard and to undervalue it when the problem is easy.

Another advice-related bias I've found compels people to overvalue advice that they pay for.

The value of most frameworks lies not in changing a manager's initial intuition but in clarifying the issues that arise when managers with different instincts try to debate the right course of action. A structured framework can transform the debate from a battle of guts, ultimately resolved on the basis of reputation, power, and eloquence (often in that order), into a comparison of the assumptions being made about a given situation's fundamental structure.

A framework presents elements and relationships that provide a grammar for the debate. These debates tend to be productive in that they are fine grained-people can move past areas of agreement, focus on areas of disagreement, and analyze why they hold different beliefs. They either achieve a consensus or make a decision knowing precisely where and why they disagree. In the case of disagreement, the debate will highlight critical assumptions that managers should be particularly mindful of as the venture progresses.

The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. The image of the future, therefore, is the key to all choice-oriented behavior.