flexible decision-making Quotes

Unpredictability is the greatest asset a leader can have.

Politicians generally form alliances and not friendships. Individuals and institutions achieve their ends through continual barter. But deals are not bonds. Indeed, intense emotional involvement with anything - with issues, ideology, a woman, even a family - can be a handicap, not only consuming valuable time, but more importantly, reducing flexibility and the capacity for detached calculation needed to take maximum advantage of continually changing circumstances.

The impression I have of Justice Warren is that he was looking for the just result in a case regardless of fixed dogma or principles and I like to think that I'm in that mold.

I think you have to sort of accept that nobody really knows where it's going so there has to be a lot of impulsive kind of attitudes. So it's like a train that's moving and you don't quite know where it's going but you try to steer it in the best way you can realizing that it may go in different places that you had no idea.

Nobody does a lot of plotting. They can't. Everybody wants to do that in life, but I think it's almost impossible. Opportunities present themselves, and you say, "Hey, is this interesting to me?" Is this something you might want to pursue? Maybe you'll get it, maybe you won't. It really does have to do with a "one foot in front of the other" kind of thing, I think.

An effective leader allows exceptions to the rule for exceptional results or when circumstance demands.

My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left the meeting or the office. In a startup, it doesn't matter if you're 100 percent right 100 percent of the time. What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based data/metrics feedback loop to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That's why startups are agile. By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them and implemented the fifteen that worked.

Organisations with decision-making speed and imagination will thrive as nobody can claim to have a monopoly over creativity.

Strategy making needs to function beyond the boxes to encourage the informal learning that produces new perspectives and new combinations... Once managers understand this, they can avoid other costly misadventures caused by applying formal techniques, without judgement and intuition, to problem solving.