Thomas George Barnett Cocks Quotes

Groupthink can become a serious issue - old ideas stay around after they're useful, and new ideas too often don't get a fair hearing.

When like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts towards extreme versions of their common beliefs.

Committees are consumers and sometimes sterilizers of ideas, rarely creators of them.

Any time people come together in a meeting, we're not necessarily getting the best ideas; we're just getting the ideas of the best talkers.

We always carry out by committee anything in which any one of us alone would be too reasonable to persist.

So you [Romans] when you have got together in a body, let yourselves be guided by those whom singly you would never think of being advised by.

Deliberation is the work of many men. Action of one alone.

Majorities without discipline are not majorities.

If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it.

One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.

No president is well-served by groupthink or by everybody singing from the same sheet of music they think he's on.

Leaders can get stuck in groupthink because they're really not listening, or they're listening only to what they want to listen to, or they actually think they're so right that they're not interested in listening. And that leads to a lot of suboptimal solutions in the world.

The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there's a single numeric average. But if it's a design or something that matters, the decision is made by committee, and that's crap. You want people and groups who are able to think thoughts before they share.

A committee is an animal with four back legs.

Muddle is the extra unknown personality in any committee.

The chairman of a committee should be in harmony with the majority who constitute it.

As for life within a Legislature,— who can tell how warped and bent and twisted, and accommodated to the exigencies of party struggle become the faculties of belief?

Too many people in this town think about politics when they make every decision.

The best … Committees consist of three persons, two of whom are always absent!

Group action -- yes; group thinking -- no.

Because of the term ‘whip’, it is assumed that members can be beaten into submission, but I’ve seldom seen that be successful. It’s getting to know the individual, what they think, how they feel, what’s going on in their personal life, are they agonizers or quick deciders, what kind of leverage can be used with them or on them.

When I cease to harmonize with the majority ... I feel that I ought no longer to hold that respectable position [Senate Commerce Committee chairman.]

A committee is not a good instrument for final judgment.

The minute somebody joins a committee... they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.

As you get larger, it is harder to have focused discussions. Because one of the things I've learned about Congress over the past four years that I've been in is there's no shortage of opinions about how things should be done on any particular subject.