John Brennan Quotes

People who are great at making decisions in the face of uncertainty have great judgment.

Study the situation thoroughly, go over in your imagination the various courses of action possible to you and the consequences which can and may follow from each course. Pick out the course which gives the most promise and go ahead.

Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.

Executives do many things in addition to making decisions. But only executives make decisions. The first managerial skill is, therefore, the making of effective decisions.

What can I learn from this? What will I do next time I'm in this situation?

The only way to make the right decision is to find out which is the wrong decision, to examine that other path without fear, and only then decide.

The most common source of mistakes in management decisions is the emphasis on finding the right answer rather than the right question.

The 1st question the effective decision-maker asks is: 'Is this a generic situation or an exception?'

One of the things I learned in the military is sometimes you don't know what mistakes you make for a long time. But as you go through a campaign, there's lots of decision points you make, and you don't know whether those are gonna be the right decision points or not.

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

And I argued with that intelligence estimate and I think it is a responsibility of policymakers to use their best judgment on the basis of the intelligence they've received.

The way to develop decisiveness is to start right where you are, with the very next question you face.

I encourage active skepticism - when people are being skeptical because they're trying to identify the best course of action. They're trying to identify the next step for themselves or other people.

At a very young age I was predicting outcomes, trying to take all the information and find the best route to wherever I was going. I avoided a lot of pitfalls because of that.

A director makes 100 decisions an hour. Students ask me how you know how to make the right decision, and I say to them, 'If you don't know how to make the right decision, you're not a director.'

I really try at least to come back and answer the question as to whether that was really the best way to do that and was I really thinking straight and how did my opponents behave and how did the judges behave was needed.

The great problem now is that we don’t know what to do.

As an intelligence analyst you have to tell the president what you know, what you think you know and what you don’t know.

I can't ever remember being struck by lightning when making a big decision. It's always about taking in more and more data points and making tack adjustments as you figure it out. I call customers, suppliers, industry analysts and try to get as much information as possible.

Father was bold, and Mother was cautious. They never shouted at each other but argued constantly about strategy, and they taught me very early that before taking big risks, one must carefully figure the odds.

I try to look at problems very clearly and think, 'How do we get out of this? What will work? What will be the consequences for the people involved?'

Critical thinking is the most important factor with chess. As it is in life, you need to think before you make decisions.

You've got to be smart about tackling.

You try to make the decisions that you think are best in realtime.

Life is very much about making the best decisions you can. So I think chess is very valuable.