Entrepreneurial Leadership

Good decisions are necessary to great execution. Yet some leaders delay making them. Others make them before having the information that would alter the probability of success. Entrepreneurial leaders know big from small, likely from unlikely, and urgent from optional. They tend to know when to take a decision—especially one of the close-vote, 51-percent-to-49-percent variety.

Those with the best wiring for decision making stood at a reasonable but challenging distance, where success depended on a combination of skill, pattern recognition, and good fortune.

Eliminate the excuse that life isn’t fair. Get comfortable with making optimal decisions from the array of possible options, rather than wishing you lived in an alternate reality.

Make good small decisions. Use small decisions as a way to practice pattern recognition, to learn what works and what doesn’t.

Usually, the chance to win the big points is earned by winning lots of smaller ones. The

Go into decisions expecting they’ll work out. Expectations impact outcomes. If you’re obsessed by thoughts of failure soon after making a decision, you should rethink your choice. By imagining winning in vivid detail, you can create positive imagery that inspires—even when early returns disappoint.

Own your bad decisions. Owning decisions is a mark of maturity. When we’re immature, we blame outcomes on others, or on outside factors.

With maturity, we learn to own our failures and bad decisions. Then we do something to correct the map. There is information in failure that can improve future decision making.

If you’re going to live with the outcome of a decision, allow others a voice but not a vote. Invite input, discount it, and maintain control of the decision.

Follow your instincts, not your emotions. One of the benefits of experience and maturity is the development of instincts.

Instincts are quick, subconscious choices or behaviors that often result from experience and practice. Emotions well up from places we don’t often understand—chief among them are anger, jealousy, greed, or fear.

Get a second or third opinion from skeptics you trust to see your blind spots—the advisors who’ll push back and make you defend your assessments.

Don’t make important decisions in haste. Although it’s important not to let fear send you into “analysis paralysis,” don’t veer too far in the other direction and make decisions too hastily if there’s no urgency to doing so.

Imagine you’re driving toward an important fork in the road on a foggy evening with the sun going down, visibility limited, and an imperative to get home. In such a case, smart drivers pull over and take a break. Entrepreneurial leaders do the same thing. Often you’ll make a better choice by sleeping on it. Your best decisions will come when you see clearly, optimistically, and in the light of day. As

forecasts based on probabilities tend to be too optimistic. We tend to want what we want, so we underestimate costs, overestimate benefits, and skew probabilities in favor of outcomes we hope for.

I never make an important decision without setting up the problem as a simulation with an array of potential outcomes—and thinking hard on whether I’ve included all potential costs and thoughtfully assessed the probabilities.

Good decisions can become great ones—if you execute them well.

Many decisions are no better for gathering more information—and worse for the delay. Thus knowing when you have just enough information to pull the trigger makes all the difference.

The decision to marry is a high-stakes one made under conditions of massive uncertainty. But the choice to love is the daily, granular, follow-on decision that makes that initial choice good or bad.

great decision can result from a marginal one that is followed by adjustment, reframing, pruning, and fixing.