Kenneth Chenault Quotes

Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level.

I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.

There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem.

At a very young age I was predicting outcomes, trying to take all the information and find the best route to wherever I was going. I avoided a lot of pitfalls because of that.

It takes time and effort and preparation to think. Statesmen are far too busy making speeches to think.

Most great leaders in history that I've studied always need to get as wide a range of opinions as possible so that they can have sufficient information to make the right decisions.

I try to look at problems very clearly and think, 'How do we get out of this? What will work? What will be the consequences for the people involved?'

Critical thinking is the most important factor with chess. As it is in life, you need to think before you make decisions.

My experience in decision-making has shown that patterns are tough to break. In the military, we study an opponent, looking for gaps, flaws, or weaknesses that can be exploited. Successful leaders at all levels in all disciplines conduct this kind of analysis.

Life is very much about making the best decisions you can. So I think chess is very valuable.

It's got to be the best intellectual exercise out there. You're seeing through new situations every ten minutes. In the stock market you don't base your decisions on what the market is doing, but on what you think is rational. Bridge is about weighing gain/loss ratios. You're doing calculations all the time.

I think what you expect of every candidate and ultimately of a president is to listen to the facts and to deal with things in a way that's smart and direct. I'm confident that's exactly what President [Donald] Trump will do.

Sometimes I do have something in my head. But, for me, I think it usually ends up being about considering all of the elements, and trying to understand the distance from where we are to where we want to go.

The best place to solve a problem is on paper.

I'm a problem-solver.

Even for practical purposes theory generally turns out the most important thing in the end.

One of the things I learned in the military is sometimes you don't know what mistakes you make for a long time. But as you go through a campaign, there's lots of decision points you make, and you don't know whether those are gonna be the right decision points or not.

I want to make smart choices.

Here's the teaching point, if you're teaching kids about intelligence and policy: Intelligence does not absolve policymakers of responsibility to ask tough questions, and it doesn't absolve them of having curiosity about the consequences of their actions.

The experience of learning how to get straight to the core of a problem proved to be of immense value later when I had a long succession of responsibilities in large, complex government departments.

Management teams aren't good at asking questions. In business school, we train them to be good at giving answers.

I like to study the question or the problem or the opportunity in hand, work with the team to come with the right answer, make a decision, and act upon it. Some people have said that, actually, today they pretty much like their bankers dull.

Effective management always means asking the right question.

I like to have fulsome discussions on every topic. What happens if you lose this show? What would you do? We have to look at every hypothesis.

Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way the car is driven.