Peter Drucker Quotes

You need to be uncomfortable and apprehensive: True strategy is about placing bets and making hard choices. The objective is not to eliminate risk but to increase the odds of success.

The issue of managing through a crisis is you have to be decisive even if you don't have perfect information.

In the face of ambiguity, uncertainty, and conflicting demands, often under great time pressure, leaders must make decisions and take effective actions to assure the survival and success of their organizations. This is how leaders add value to their organizations. They lead them to success by exercising good judgment, by making smart calls when especially difficult and complicated decisions simply must be made, and then ensuring that they are well executed.

When you make something you are always offering some choices and denying others.

The more adaptability exists for a given kind of decision, the less risky it is to make plans for the future, and therefore the more likely it is that more people will make more plans in such areas.

In strategic decisions, I'd be really concerned about overconfidence.

Sometimes in life you have to make a decision and make sacrifices.

Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.

You have to make smart decisions, but you never know what will happen in the future.

It's not like you take the right turning and you get everlasting happiness and you take the wrong one and your life's a disaster. In real life it's often impossible to tell which decision is the one you should make because what you stand to gain and what you stand to lose are sometimes-often-neck and neck.

There's no such thing as a perfect play. Sometimes you have to protect the life of the play.

There were in life rarely, if ever, "right" decisions, never perfect ones, only the best to be made under the circumstances.

In my experience of large enterprises, I have found it is often a mistake to try to settle everything at once.

There are no safe choices. Only other choices.

Choosing a path means having to miss out on others

There are a lot of decisions we pass up on because we think, "You know what? That's just going to build - you know, maybe that's going to build me and not build the ministry and what I'm trying to do." So we pass up on a lot of opportunities.

I had to make these decisions after 9/11, make a decision about how to proceed forward with an investigation or how to pull back, whether you use certain actionable intelligence or whether not to. And yet they continue to debate about this bill and in the subcommittee and what - nobody in America cares about that.

Decisions are always made with insufficient information. If you really knew what was going on, the decision would make itself.

I don't know that I could draw one that's perfect. But I'd rather by approximately right than precisely wrong, and it would be precisely wrong to turn it down.

There is the risk you cannot afford to take, and there is the risk you cannot afford not to take.

You cannot eat your cake and have it.

Take the probability of loss times the amount of possible loss from the probability of gain times the amount of possible gain. That is what we're trying to do. It's imperfect, but that's what it's all about.

The leader of a company needs to have a decision tree in his head - if this happens, we go this way, but if it winds up like that, then we go this other way.

You can't be 100% perfect, but try to evaluate things and do what's right. If you just make every effort to do the right thing, you'll come out ok. It comes down to priorities and making good decisions.

Human life very much resembles a game of chess: for, as in the latter, while a gamester is too attentive to secure himself very strongly on one side of the board, he is apt to leave an unguarded opening on the other, so doth it often happen in life.