Critical Decision Making Quotes

Every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities. Each can spell either salvation or doom.

Decisions of the kind the executive has to make are not made well by acclamation. They are made well only if based on the clash of conflicting views...The first rule in decision-making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement.

Being the leader means you have to make life or death decisions sometimes.

As a pediatric neurosurgeon, I frequently faced life and death situations, and had to come up with the right diagnosis, the right plan, and execute that plan frequently with other colleagues.

When you are confronted with a genuine emergency, then I think you have to look at the interest of the country first.

There are no truer choices than those made in crisis, choices made without judgment.

'Why do you think it is...', I asked Dr. Cook ... 'that brain surgery, above all else-even rocket science-gets singled out as the most challenging of human feats, the one demanding the utmost of human intelligence?' [Dr. Cook answered,] 'No margin for error.'

When everything is at risk, good judgment, not haste, makes the difference between life and death. Panic is the enemy.

To play at Chesse when the house is on fire.

... you can think about that for everyone you hire: will I bet the future of this company on this single hire? And that's a tough bar.

You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.

The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the important things in order to accomplish the vital ones.

Sometimes you don't get but one mistake, if the one you pick is bad enough.

Guard yourself and your conscience no one else will and know that a bad decision at the right time can destroy you far more surely than any bullet!

The urgent necessity is to make a decision - whether or not it is right.

They [policemen] are in a profession that if you do the job incorrectly, or proceeding incorrectly, it's over for you because there isn't any supporter backup. If you make a mistake as a plumber, you know, you fix it and everything goes on or you get sued. But if you make a mistake as a cop, you are more infamous than Jesse James, everything's over.

Where the very safety of the country depends upon the resolution to be taken, no consideration of justice or injustice, humanity or cruelty, nor of glory or of shame, should be allowed to prevail. But putting all other considerations aside, the only question should be: What course will save the life and liberty of the country?

This would be a tricky operation, no doubt of that, and a mistake would probably be fatal. So many things he had done over the years would have been fatal, had his luck not been strongly good. He had cheated death dozens of times, but that did not mean he could take it as a given. A man needed only one fatal mistake to end the game.

The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude, and perseverance.