185 Posts Found

Explanatory power is a red herring when the objective is predictive accuracy.

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael E. Raynor | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Trends / Analysis

The next time someone offers you advice, ask yourself these two questions: Can I imagine the opposite ever making sense, and will I know if I’ve acted on it? If the answer to either one is “no,” you’re at grave risk of being led astray.

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael E. Raynor | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Personal Development, Thought

If deductive reasoning were all it ever took to reach a correct conclusion, there would be far fewer bad decisions. The problem is, far too often the facts are either ambiguous or incomplete in ways we cannot see until it is too late. When we apply reason to unwittingly incorrect or unknowingly under-specified premises, we end up with precise, convincing, and completely wrong conclusions. It’s … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Michael E. Raynor | Source: The Conference Board Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Thought

Matthew Ridgway, U.S. army general in the Korean War, says, “The hard decisions are not the ones you make in the heat of battle.” A lot of people can do that. The hard part is actually sitting in a meeting and speaking your mind about a bad idea that’s going to put thousands of lives in jeopardy — and convincing the decision makers that it’s … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Hayagreeva Rao | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Decision Making, Leadership

Every manager must make the distinction between “correlation” and “cause and effect” regularly, as the topic comes up in many guises.

Content: Quotation | Author: Thomas C. Redman | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Trends / Analysis

Next time you find yourself in a crisis moment, ask this question: what is the best outcome from here? Firstly, those around you will likely go into shock. We are not used to hearing an intelligent, helpful question in a crisis situation. Once they get over their shock, it will work for three reasons: It assumes that there actually is an outcome; It focuses everybody … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Fuda | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Crisis Management, Decision Making, Leadership

Decision-making is the ultimate reason why accountants and finance people exist. The way to judge the quality of an accounting or performance management system is to determine whether it is spurring quality decision-making.

Content: Quotation | Author: Charles Horngren | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Accounting, Decision Making, Finance

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance–it is the illusion of knowledge.

Content: Quotation | Subjects: Decision Making, Knowledge, Personal Development, Thought

Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.

Content: Quotation | Subjects: Decision Making, Experience

Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.

Content: Quotation | Subjects: Decision Making, Thought

In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

Content: Quotation | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Thought

When things get too complicated, it sometimes makes sense to stop and wonder: Have I asked the right question?

Content: Quotation | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Thought

Gentlemen, I take it that we are all in complete agreement on the decision here. Then, I propose that we postpone further discussion […] to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.

Content: Quotation | Author: Alfred P. Sloan | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Man can always be blind to a thing as long as it is big enough.

Content: Quotation | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Thought, Vision

Simple decision rules, structures and relationships are not likely to be effective approaches when the task at hand involves making decisions in the context of complex systems. Ironically, many of our most embedded management practices—such as designing for optimization and for efficiency—only exacerbate the risks of things going wrong at a systems level. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the most robust complex systems are often not designed for … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Gökçe Sargut, Rita Gunther McGrath | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior, Risk Management

People automatically associate input related to quantity (how long it takes to make a car) with output quality (how well it performs). While in many cases, input information does directly correspond to outcome, in some cases it does not. Yet humans are hardwired to automatically associate input and output. And people can prey on your input bias, causing you to make poor decisions or judgments … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Maurice Schweitzer, Stephanie Overby | Source: CIO Magazine | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development, Personality / Behavior, Thought

If you want the imagination to see the future, then you better have the wisdom to appreciate the past. An obsession with the present—with what’s “hot”, and what’s “in”—may be dazzling, but all that does is blind everyone to the reality. Show me a chief executive who ignores yesterday, who favors the new outsider over the experienced insider, the quick fix over steady progress, and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Henry Mintzberg | Source: Leader to Leader | Subjects: Decision Making, Experience, Future, History, Management

A time of turbulence is a dangerous time, but its greatest danger is a temptation to deny reality.

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter F. Drucker | Subjects: Change Management, Decision Making, Management

What you are trying to develop in a manager is a kind of inductive skill in reading the terrain; of knowing intuitively when the paradigms are about to change or bust up—or endure.

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Cappelli | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Decision Making, Future, Management, Trends / Analysis

Smart organizations ignore the urgent. Smart organizations understand that important issues are the ones to deal with. If you focus on the important stuff, the urgent will take care of itself. A key corollary to this principle is the idea that if you don’t have the time to do it right, there’s no way in the world you’ll find the time to do it over. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Seth Godin | Source: Fast Company | Subjects: Attention, Decision Making, Management, Personal Development, Time Management