Noah Desai Weiss

When you are guided by consensus, it often means you are reaching the most vanilla or neutral outcomes.

Noah Desai Weiss

Data can help solve easy problems, but it doesn’t actually solve the hard problems. A hard problem can’t be solved by experimenting your way out of it. You have to figure out if it’s a big swing you want to take. You do that by using intuition.

Crossing the mental Rubicon: Don’t let decisiveness backfire

We demand that leaders be decisive, but research in social psychology and behavioral economics suggests that decisiveness is not an unequivocal good. Studies on “mindset” reveal that, when contemplating an important decision, prematurely focusing on execution can exacerbate decision-making biases and lead to overconfidence and excessive risk-taking.

Tim Koller

Psychologists have identified more than 60 cognitive biases that affect how people make decisions. We boiled them down into four groups: group think; confirmation bias; loss aversion, which leads us to put more weight on losses than gains; and anchoring or inertia—anchoring decisions in what we did in the past.

How to Think Clearly in Turbulent Times: Lessons from Charlie Munger

Munger’s success was built on a system for decision-making—not a classical investment philosophy, but rather a mental discipline underpinning one. We outline four ideas strategists can learn from Munger to think more clearly in turbulent times.

Adam Bryant, Kevin Sharer

The strategy, purpose, and values discussions—what Kevin Sharer, the former CEO of Amgen, calls a company’s “social architecture”—have often felt like separate exercises, but they now need to work in concert. “If you don’t have a social architecture that’s solid, well-accepted, and can be operationalized against the most important decisions you make, that’s leadership’s fault,” said Sharer.

Herbert Simon

Decision makers can satisfice either by finding optimum solutions for a simplified world, or by finding satisfactory solutions for a more realistic world.

Sara Clemens

At large corporations, making decisions is often not a matter of getting somebody to say yes, it’s getting nobody to say no.

Sara Clemens

The key thing that leads people to feel like companies are slowing down is when decisions don’t get made, when there is an opportunity or an issue and it just drifts on. Not knowing who can make a decision is the curse of large organizations.

How To Make Better Decisions

Understanding how and why people think the way they do will help you with everything from customer service to evaluating mergers and strategic initiatives. Takeaways from a life of study.

Annie Duke

As you consider a past decision as a team, think about what you knew before you made it. What was revealed after the fact? Could you have known about it beforehand?

We tend to only review decisions that are associated with bad outcomes, like missing a sales target by 10%. But when you exceed that same target by 10%, there’s no meeting, no post-mortem. Just congratulations … [ Read more ]

Annie Duke

To make great decisions, you need accountability, repeatability, and examinability. I always describe it like this: We need to create an evidentiary record, a way to Google our own decision-making.

What Kind of Leader Are You? How Three Action Orientations Can Help You Meet the Moment

Executives who confront new challenges with old formulas often fail. The best leaders tailor their approach, recalibrating their “action orientation” to address the problem at hand, says Ryan Raffaelli. He details three action orientations and how leaders can harness them.

Patrick Collison

[Don’t] treat all decisions uniformly. I think the most obvious axis to break them down on are degree of reversibility and magnitude. Things with low reversibility and great impact and magnitude, those ones you do want to really deliberate over and try to get right.

Mark Mortensen

Divide decisions into one-way versus two-way door decisions. Two-way door decisions are those that are relatively easy to undo. Both Bezos and Branson argue that we shouldn’t waste a lot of time deliberating and debating such decisions, but rather try them out and then roll them back if needed. Two-way door decisions are great opportunities for learning. In contrast, one-way door decisions are those that … [ Read more ]

Class Takeaways — The Human Factor

Five lessons in five minutes: Professor Szu-chi Huang on how humans make decisions and get motivated.

Constantinos C. Markides

I propose that there are two key parameters that an organization needs to put in place to guide decision-making. The first is the organization’s clearly communicated strategy. This is defined by the difficult choices leadership has made that determine which decisions are “strategic” (and should be undertaken only by top management) and which decisions are “operational” (and can be undertaken by employees). The second parameter … [ Read more ]

Eric J. McNulty

We tend to respond to what’s presented to us. It takes extra effort to stop and ask, “What’s missing?” Our energy-conscious brains like to be efficient. The problem is that not having all of the information we need can lead us to make a poor decision.

Tobi Lütke

Your skill in decision-making is directly proportional to your quality of information acquisition. So, how good are you at making decisions? How good are you at acquiring information?

Baba Shiv

In the real world, there is no such thing as making the right decision. You make the decision and then make the decision right.