A Quote by Marillyn Hewson

In times of uncertainty, employees crave clarity. As a leader, you won't always have all of the answers - no one expects you to - so you must be open to listening and learning from others. Once you understand a particular challenge and outline the options, you have to be confident in making bold and optimistic decisions.

Marillyn Hewson

Quote Topics

Learning Always Answers Be Confident Bold Challenge Clarity Confident Crave Decisions Employees Expects Leader Learning From Others Listening Making Must Once Open Optimistic Options Others Outline Particular Times Uncertainty Understand

Quote Author

Marillyn Hewson
American - Businesswoman
Born: 1954

Usually, I'm pretty good about sorting through the options and then making decisions that I'm confident are the best decisions in that moment, given the information we have. But there are times where I think I wish I could have imagined a different level of insight.

Barack Obama

An American leader would be derelict of duty if he did not seek to understand all his options in such unprecedented circumstances. Presidents Lincoln during the Civil War and Roosevelt in the lead-up to World War II sought legal advice about the outer bounds of their power - even if they did not always use it. Our leaders should ask legal questions first, before setting policy or making decisions in a fog of uncertainty.

John Yoo

I don't have a particular recommendation other than that we base decisions on as much hard data as possible. We need to carefully look at all the options and all their ramifications in making our decisions.

Dorothy Denning

Listen to clients, employees, and peers and stay open to their ideas, feedback, and answers. Doing so is vital to the success of any leader.

Adena Friedman

An effective leader is willing to think about what's happening and how to understand what's going on. Facilitating flow and making others more conscious of it, the leader communicates an awareness of process to the group, making them more aware of their energies and options. One important principle is to keep track of who has not spoken. ... It's also important to notice when people do speak out but are not heard. Effective leaders practice patience, reminding themselves to wait and observe, remembering that there's always more going on in a group than we're consciously aware of.

Diane Dreher

Whether baseball or football, we're tasked in front offices with making decisions under uncertainty. How do you corral that uncertainty in a way to make more consistently better decisions? That's very similar.

Paul DePodesta

It's an open secret: Even now, in the 21st century, Korean executives often consult spiritual advisers before making major business decisions - decisions that can affect their employees around the world.

Kim Young-ha

In the face of uncertainty, many companies will default to asking their innovators to study and analyze, which can't actually ever provide a definitive answer. The decision-making systems here are meant to deal with the reality that decisions about innovative ideas will rely on patterns and intuitions. The best venture capital organizations deal with this challenge by staging investment, actively participating in startups they fund, tying decisions to learning as opposed to artificial dates on the calendar, and assembling a diverse team of decision-makers.

Scott D. Anthony

Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp.

Thomas A. Edison

Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open.

Laura Bush

Another idea that is changing is that the leader must be one who can make quick decisions. The leader to-day is often one who thinks out his decisions very slowly.

Mary Parker Follett

If we decide rightly what to do, or use a correct procedure for making such decisions, that has to be because the decisions or the procedure rest on good reasons, and these reasons consist in the apprehension of truths about what we ought to do. Because these truths must constitute reasons for our decisions, and because in the rational order, reasons must always precede the decisions based on them, the truth conditions of claims about what we ought to cannot be reduced to, or constructed out of, decisions about what to do, or procedures for making such decisions.

Allen W. Wood

When you are in a growth company, you have to really open people's eyes to the bigger possibilities so they think differently. Once they understand how to define success and what their role is in success, they make better decisions, and you can push decision-making down.

Dan Rosensweig

Listening is an essential part of praying. Answers from the Lord come quietly-every so quietly. In fact, few hear his answers audibly with their ears. We must be listening carefully or we will never recognize them.

H. Burke Peterson

Decision-making is difficult because, by its nature, it involves uncertainty. If there was no uncertainty, decisions would be easy! The uncertainty exists because we don't know the future, we don't know if the decision we make will lead to the best possible outcome. Cognitive science has taught us that relying on our gut or intuition often leads to bad decisions, particularly in cases where statistical information is available. Our guts and our brains didn't evolve to deal with probabilistic thinking.