Louis B. Rosenberg Quotes

You want consensus, but there are times when people are just not going to agree. So you just have to decide.

If in the first group of people who have gathered, unanimity is not achieved, new people shall be added, after which a group equal in number to the Greatest Name or fewer or greater shall be chosen from their midst by lots; whereupon the consultation shall be renewed; whatever is the result shall be obeyed. If the second time opinions again differ, repeat the process a third time. This time obey the majority vote.

When team members openly and passionately share their opinions about a decision, they don't wonder whether anyone is holding back. Then, when the leader has to step in and make a decision because there is no easy consensus, team members will accept that decision because they know that their ideas were heard and considered.

Forcing polarized groups into a swarm allows them to find the answer that most people are satisfied with.

A swarm finds the solution people best agree upon. It optimizes collective support, whereas a poll tells us how we disagree.

Unfortunately, unanimity is not always feasible.

When men organize themselves into groups, and they make rules based on common or self-interest, it's always tangled and political.

Any time the country is split 50/50, the leader is wrong.

When you have too many people and you're trying to satisfy everybody's input, you usually end up with something so incredibly generic that it has no point of view.

You've got to work things out in the cloakroom, and when you've got them worked out, you can debate a little before you vote.

At a school in Massachusetts where I once worked, we managed early on through consensus. Which sounds wonderful, but it was just a very, very difficult way to sort of manage anything, because convincing everybody to do one particular thing, especially if it was hard, was almost impossible.

Consensus building doesn't necessarily fit with my experience.

I think that a president needs to have a variety of views presented. But also, there has to be a team effort, because otherwise, I think it creates a dissonance and difficulty.

Just because a group does not take its decisions by voting does not mean they have no understanding of the essence of democracy.

I worked with a group of people who argued day and night - professors, officials, the Minister of Finance - but there were decisions that I had to make.

Anytime you get nine people together, whether it's at a party or it's in the conference room of the Supreme Court, you do have to maintain some order, or it does kind of degenerate into squabbling pretty quickly.

I don't envisage collectivism. There is no such animal, it is always individualism, sometimes the rest vote and sometimes they do not, and if they do they do and if they do not they do not.

Muddle is the extra unknown personality in any committee.

It's good to have a leader, otherwise we argue too much.

Many CEOs and leaders think that silence is indeed golden, that consensus is bliss. It is - sometimes. But more often what it signifies is that there are no respected processes for surfacing concerns and dissent.

Too many problem-solving sessions become battlegrounds where decisions are made based on power rather than intelligence.

The views of several individuals are assuredly preferable to one man, even as the power of a number of men is of course greater than the power of one man.

In every free and deliberating society, there must, from the nature of man, be opposite parties, and violent dissentions and discords; and one of these, for the most part, must prevail over the other for a longer or shorter time.

Majority rule is not the norm for solving issues or problems.

Joint committees are heat generators rather than light producers.