Don A. Moore > Quotes

“But intuition is not perfect, and it errs in predictable ways. By relying on our intuition, therefore, we risk making substantial errors. The inclination to blindly trust intuition and to be convinced by anecdotal evidence of its effectiveness can be enormously harmful.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“All four have made decisions designed to steer people toward wiser decisions that create collective good. They have all acted as architects who helped better structure decision-making contexts for others. Throughout the book we will explore similarly effective and inspiring leaders and extract lessons that can help you become a better leader by making small adjustments with big effects.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Leaders routinely pay too much attention to outcomes while neglecting information about individuals’ decision-making processes and the uncertainty that surrounds their decisions, a phenomenon known as the outcome bias.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“Leaders can facilitate better decisions in their organizations by encouraging others to make comparisons when facing important decisions. Comparisons can be particularly relevant in the realms of hiring, choosing an acquisition target, and deciding which project to fund or which supplier to use.33 Comparison steers us toward System 2 thinking, greater deliberation, and better decisions.”
― 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

“In this book we aim to define leadership in a new way, one grounded in the belief that leaders’ success depends not only on their ability to make good decisions but also on their ability to help others make wise decisions.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“Leaders not only make critical decisions themselves but also create and design organizations that influence the decisions of hundreds, thousands, or even millions.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“we can help you improve your own decisions and those made in your organization—often by showing you when to question your intuition and what to do instead of following your gut.”
― 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

“Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“That book helped introduce what is now commonly called behavioral economics: using psychology to understand behavior of economic consequence.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“Companies have incentives to introduce these barriers. When they do so, they successfully exploit the power of the situation to produce behaviors they desire.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“leaders can encourage wise risk taking by rewarding well-intentioned failure. In other words, you should not punish people for unlucky outcomes on smart bets with positive expected value.”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices

“If you change behavior without changing people’s hearts and minds, he asked, is that really leadership?”
― Don A. Moore, Decision Leadership: Empowering Others to Make Better Choices