Decision Making Processes Quotes

Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?

Nothing is more fallacious than to expect to produce any valuable or permanent results in political projects by relying merely on the reason of men. Men are ... for the most part governed by the impulses of passion.

Anybody who's ever been in a large organization realizes that 'optimizing' is not a word that would often be used to describe any large organization. The reason is that it's full of people, who are complicated.

A minor symptom of wars is the cancerous growth of committees.

Our bureaucracy had excelled at compartmentalizing intelligence - we had a 'need to know' system - but by 2004, it was impossible to foresee what elements of our organization would and would not need to know a given piece of information.

Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.

I think that military, corporate, and non-political organizations are pretty much similar.

The more we do to avoid risk and protect our members from tough votes, the more ineffective and polarized the institution becomes

Different presidents have different strengths, they bring different life experiences.

We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational.

If we consider the manner in which those who assume the office of directing the conduct of others execute their undertaking, it will not be very wonderful that their labours, however zealous or affectionate, are frequently useless. For what is the advice that is commonly given? A few general maxims, enforced with vehemence, and inculcated with importunity, but failing for want of particular reference and immediate application.

We never like to admit to ourselves that we have made a mistake. Organizational structures tend to accentuate this source of failure of information.

Women tell things in more interesting ways. They live with more feeling. They observe themselves and their lives. Men are more impressed with action. For them, the sequence of events is more important.

Even the most analytical thinkers are predictably irrational; the really smart ones acknowledge and address their irrationalities.

The psychology of committees is a special case of the psychology of mobs.

At first I intended to become a student of the Senate rules and I did learn much about them, but I soon found that the Senate hadbut one fixed rule, subject to exceptions of course, which was to the effect that the Senate would do anything it wanted to do whenever it wanted to do it.

Behavioral economics can explain some things, but it's hard to explain a lot of the underlying processes that generate these decisions, much less some of these unconscious things that we don't have a handle on at all.

Men don't want to be confused by the facts when their minds are already made up. Women know the art of negotiation - just ask the mother of a four-year-old who refuses to eat his veggies or the parent of a teenager.

Families and societies are small and large versions of one another. Both are made up of people who have to work together, whose destinies are tied up with one another. Each features the components of a relationship: leaders perform roles relative to the led, the young to the old, and male to female; and each is involved with the process of decision-making, use of authority, and the seeking of common goals.

At the end of the day, the Washington establishment is going to go where they're going to go.

In a world in which technology is changing at such a fast pace, where demand conditions change very fast, we need to look at a more innovative mechanism to cut down on this rigmarole of many tiers of decision-making processes.

In a world of dispersed authority, the battle for the truth will be won or lost with the employees.

Now to what...? How we teach people to make choices and the things they're going to make choices over - that is culturally learned.