Decision Leadership Quotes

“Leaders make intentional choices with the goal of changing and improving the decisions of others. Ethical decisions create greater good for all.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“Consider what others know that you don’t and how their own egocentric perspectives, like yours, may have influenced their perceptions.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“Consistently, people tend to honestly believe they contributed more to an enterprise than they actually did.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“Every one will think his share too small and they will be always complaining and attacking one another”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“As a leader, you have a special obligation to consider how others may respond to your directives.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“As a leader, you can help others make choices that are more consistent with their own values by inviting them to consider multiple options.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“Where there is disagreement over the right principle, invite others to consider the problem from a variety of perspectives.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“Utilitarianism is not focused simply on saving lives; it is more broadly focused on maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain (creating value) across all sentient beings.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“The gains from trading ideas and scientific knowledge are at least as valuable as those to be made from trading food for money in the restaurant industry. Cooperation with others in your industry may increase the chances that others will reciprocate with cooperative moves of their own. They might also seek you out as a partner in the future. Most important, you can take pride in making the world a little better by choosing to cooperate rather than compete.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“A post-settlement settlement offers a final attempt to create value without either party running the risk of losing value by sharing information.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“Asking questions increases the likelihood of learning useful information from the other side that will allow you to find wise trades and create value in the process.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“A well-prepared negotiator should know how important each issue is to their own side and should be thinking about how important each issue is to the other side.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“Evidence from experiments can help leaders overcome their weaknesses and make better decisions.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“Experimentation is simply a method for trying new ideas in a systematic manner and learning what works.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“Experiments have three essential features. First, every experiment has a dependent measure—an outcome of interest. Second, the independent variable creates different experimental conditions. Finally, and most distinctively, experiments assign individuals to conditions at random.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“When we want to introduce a change, why not do so in a manner that allows us to determine whether the change is actually effective? Failing to experiment wastes organizational resources and impedes learning from the strategies we try.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“Thaler conducted experiments cataloguing decision anomalies. His work demonstrated psychological influences on decisions that would not exist if humans were completely rational. These sorts of experiments fundamentally undermined the rationality assumption on which so many economic theories were based.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“That is the second step in the innovation cycle at Netflix: “For a big idea, test it out.” When the stakes are high, see if you can conduct an experiment that will allow you to put your idea to the test.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“When you are asking for solutions to tough problems, treat any advice you receive—especially when it is simple or optimistic—with a healthy dose of skepticism. Just because advice comes from smart people with fancy graduate degrees does not make it ethical or even likely to promote the long-term health of your organization.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“Leaders’ desire for affirmation is so powerful that they will pay people to agree with them.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“Average opinion, after all, includes some ill-informed opinions that could work against accuracy. Identifying the most qualified experts might help avoid fools.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“There is special danger in being the leader who peddles overconfident ambition. Aspiring leaders can gain credibility and an advantage over rivals by cloaking themselves in the mantle of confidence. To pick a biological analogy, animals sometimes exaggerate their strength.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“As the crisis of the 737 Max vividly illustrates, delusional, ambitious goals can lead people to cut corners, in addition to increasing stress and burnout.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“You can learn, for instance, that when your feelings make you want to say you are 90 percent sure of yourself, you are correct only 60 percent of the time. This is a valuable lesson for improving your decisions.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“Leaders’ confidence is most useful when based on reality. Demagogues, fools, and charlatans may pretend they know exactly what the future holds. But the future is best thought of as a distribution of possible outcomes, some more likely than others. Mapping that uncertainty allows you to place smart bets that maximize expected value or minimize the expected loss of life. As a leader, this is how to sharpen your thinking and messaging. You should be the type of leader with the courage to admit uncertainty and use it to make wise decisions. Even so, leaders face difficult decisions about how ambitious they can be.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“You gain more respect as a leader when you admit you don’t have all the answers,” says Steve Kerr, the coach of the championship Golden State Warriors basketball team. “It can actually add to your credibility.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“Mapping uncertainty allows you to place smart bets that maximize expected value or minimize expected losses.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“mentors, and decision makers, leaders have a special responsibility to be honest. The leader who gives false hope can be exposed as hypocritical, incompetent, or delusional.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“Optimism can represent one form of overconfidence—an overestimation of one’s potential, ability, or future performance. Indeed, confident optimists are more likely to be elevated to positions of social status and leadership, as Don’s research shows.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices