When companies fail, it’s usually for reasons that almost everyone knows but almost no one has voiced. When someone isn’t making good decisions, few have the guts to tell that person, especially if that person is the boss.

The worst mistake a boss can make is not to say "well done".

When leaders fail to tell employees that they're doing a great job, they might as well be taking money out of their pockets and throwing it into a fire.

Good decision-making is like playing chess and you must avoid making hasty decisions without thinking of how that particular decision will impact on different aspects of your work and organization. The worst kind of decision-making is to decide to delay a difficult decision until later or to pass it to someone else to have to make. You will never excel and be valued by your colleagues if you get into these habits of procrastination and passing responsibility to others.

It’s very rarely a good career move to have a conscience.

Good decisions aren’t always rational.

It might seem perverse, but the CEO is usually the last to know. With great power comes great ignorance.

How few there are who have courage enough to own their faults, or resolution enough to mend them.

courage is particularly important, because every decision that a CEO makes is based on incomplete information. At the time of any given decision, the CEO will generally have less than 10 percent of the information typically present in the post hoc Harvard Business School case study. As a result, the CEO must have the courage to bet the company on a direction even though she does not know if the direction is right. The most difficult decisions (and often the most important) are difficult precisely because they will be deeply unpopular with the CEO’s most important constituencies (employees, investors, and customers).

If an engineer needs a decision made, which boss should she go to?

We know, we feel in our guts, that decisions are constantly being made which are going to wreck our ambitions, our dreams, our personal relationships. But the people making those decisions are keeping them secret, because if they don’t they’ll lose the leverage they have over their subordinates.

At the time of any given decision, the CEO will generally have less than 10 percent of the information typically present in the post hoc Harvard Business School case study.

It's hard to save poor early decisions with good late decisions.

• It's hard to write a best-selling book if you chose an unpopular topic.
• It's hard to build a happy marriage if you married an unhappy person.
• It's hard to make money in real estate if you overpaid at the beginning.

Certainly, things can be improved by making good decisions along the way, but the effects of poor early decisions tend to linger.

When the boss won’t talk go and take a walk—sit down, sit down
When the boss see that he’ll want a little chat—sit down, sit down