Decisive Quotes

“Peter Drucker challenged executives to capitalize on “unexpected success.” He wrote: When a new venture does succeed, more often than not it is in a market other than the one it was originally intended to serve, with products or services not quite those with which it had set out, bought in large part by customers it did not even think of when it started, and used for a host of purposes besides the ones for which the products were first designed. If a new venture does not anticipate this, organizing itself to take advantage of the unexpected and unseen markets … then it will succeed only in creating an opportunity for a competitor.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Say your husband wants to start a business creating topiary sculptures for clients. You think the idea is bonkers, but you admire his passion, so it seems cruel to veto it. Instead, set a tripwire. Okay, dear, let’s give the topiary-sculpture business a shot, but can we agree that we won’t invest more than $10,000 of our savings in it? Alternatively, you might say: Go for it, but if you don’t have a paying customer within three months, let’s talk seriously about Plan B.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“psychologist Gary Klein, inspired by this research, devised a method for testing decisions that he calls the “premortem.” A postmortem analysis begins after a death and asks, “What caused it?” A premortem, by contrast, imagines the future “death” of a project and asks, “What killed it?” A team running a premortem analysis starts by assuming a bleak future: Okay, it’s 12 months from now, and our project was a total fiasco. It blew up in our faces. Why did it fail?”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Peter Bregman, a productivity guru and blogger for the Harvard Business Review, recommends a simple trick for dodging this fate. He advises us to set a timer that goes off once every hour, and when it beeps, we should ask ourselves, “Am I doing what I most need to be doing right now?”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“As recounted in his book It’s Your Ship, one of Captain Abrashoff’s first moves was to interview every one of the 310 crew members on the ship. He learned their personal histories and their motivations for joining the navy, and he sought their opinions about the Benfold: What do you like most? Least? What would you change if you could?”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Make it concrete: Look back over your schedule for the past week and ask yourself, What, specifically, would I have given up to carve out the extra three or four or five hours that I’ll need?”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Without clear priorities to draw on, the decision will be made idiosyncratically, depending on the employee’s mood at the moment.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Research has found that interviews are less predictive of job performance than work samples, job-knowledge tests, and peer ratings of past job performance. Even a simple intelligence test is substantially more predictive than an interview.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Sarasvathy, the professor, found that this preference for testing, rather than planning, was one of the most striking differences between entrepreneurs and corporate executives.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“To ooch is to construct small experiments to test one’s hypothesis.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“The advice to trust the numbers isn’t motivated by geekery; it’s motivated by humility. We can’t lose sight of what the numbers represent: A lot of people like us—people full of passion for their opportunities—spent their time trying something very similar to what we’re contemplating. To ignore their experience isn’t brave and romantic—“I’m not going to let some analysis stand in the way of doing what I believe.” Rather, it’s egotistical. It’s saying, We set ourselves apart from everyone else. We’re different. We’re better.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“An expert is simply someone who has more experience than you.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“The most important lesson to learn about devil’s advocacy isn’t the need for a formal contrarian position; it’s the need to interpret criticism as a noble function. An effective promotor fidei is not a token argumentative smarty-pants; it’s someone who deeply respects the Catholic Church and is trying to defend the faith by surfacing contrary arguments in situations where skepticism is unlikely to surface naturally.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“It seems some CEOs who pay extremely large acquisition premiums … come to believe their own press.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Good ideas are often adopted quickly. When all retailers adopt centralized checkout as a “best practice,” it’s no longer a competitive advantage for anyone.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“The massive scale of Walmart—its $444 billion revenue in 2012 amounts to $64 for every person on earth—inspires a complicated mixture of emotions: awe, fear, admiration, and loathing.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“To diagnose whether your colleagues have created real or sham options, poll them for their preferences. If there’s disagreement, that’s a great sign that you have real options. An easy consensus may be a red flag.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“One rule of thumb is to keep searching for options until you fall in love at least twice. If you’ve only identified one good candidate for a job, for instance, you’ll have the strong urge to talk yourself into hiring her, which is a recipe for the confirmation bias.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“try the Vanishing Options Test: Ask them what they’d do if their current alternatives disappeared.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“What if we started every decision by asking some simple questions: What are we giving up by making this choice? What else could we do with the same time and money?”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“the fourth villain of decision making is overconfidence. People think they know more than they do about how the future will unfold.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“the third villain of decision making: short-term emotion. When we’ve got a difficult decision to make, our feelings churn. We replay the same arguments in our head. We agonize about our circumstances. We change our minds from day to day. If our decision was represented on a spreadsheet, none of the numbers would be changing—there’s no new information being added—but it doesn’t feel that way in our heads. We have kicked up so much dust that we can’t see the way forward. In those moments, what we need most is perspective.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“Any time in life you’re tempted to think, ‘Should I do this OR that?’ instead, ask yourself, ‘Is there a way I can do this AND that?’ It’s surprisingly frequent that it’s feasible to do both things.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“One study of corporate mergers and acquisitions—some of the highest-stakes decisions executives make—showed that 83% failed to create any value for shareholders.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

“This brings us to the third villain of decision making: short-term emotion. When we’ve got a difficult decision to make, our feelings churn. We replay the same arguments in our head. We agonize about our circumstances. We change our minds from day to day. If our decision was represented on a spreadsheet, none of the numbers would be changing—there’s no new information being added—but it doesn’t feel that way in our heads. We have kicked up so much dust that we can’t see the way forward. In those moments, what we need most is perspective.”
― Chip Heath, Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work