Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko

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 … [ Read more ]

Doug Sundheim

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 … [ Read more ]

Roger Martin

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 … [ Read more ]

General Omar Nelson Bradley

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.

G.K. Chesterton

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.

Alfred P. Sloan Jr.

The final act of business judgment is of course intuitive. … 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.

Schackle

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.

Herbert Simon

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.

Bowen H. McCoy

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.

Steven Levitt

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.

Bruce D. Henderson

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 … [ Read more ]

Stever Robbins

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

Robert Frost

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

William Shakespeare

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

Ian Mitroff

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 … [ Read more ]

Bruce A. Pasternack and James O’Toole

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.

Reinhard Selten

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 … [ Read more ]

Alvin Toffler

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 … [ Read more ]

Daniel Kahneman

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. … [ Read more ]