most decisions are two-way doors. if you make the wrong decision, you walk out the door. you pick a door, you walk out, you spend a little time there. it turns out to be the wrong decision, you can come back in and pick another door. some decisions are so consequential and so important and so hard to reverse that they really are one-way door decisions. you go in that door, you're not coming back out. of all the people we'll talk about today, Bezos is the most methodical. he's got the most specific ideas about how a decision should be made. and like we just saw, he separates decisions into two-way door decisions, which are reversible, and one-way door decisions, which are not. and he says that one common mistake many companies or, in general, groups of people, organizations make is that they have one single decision-making process. and typically that decision-making process is the heavyweight decision-making process, which is designed for the one-way irreversible decisions, but they also apply it to the two-way decisions, which should be made in a much more

agile way. What he says is that two-way door decisions, the reversible ones, should be made by one individual or a very small team efficiently and in a timely manner, and the less frequent one-way door decisions should be slowed down, escalated to Senior Management, and all the careful detailed analysis that can be done on them should be done on them. And that's why he said that when he was CEO of Amazon, he used to be known as Chief Slowdown Officer, because one thing he constantly did was slow down eager individuals and eager teams from making one-way door decisions too quickly. But either way, be it one-way door or two-way door, he does not like compromise. Compromise in the understanding of we'll take a part of my idea and a part of your idea and we'll average it out and that will be the decision. He considers this to be the worst way of making decisions. In terms of understanding what kinds of decisions are one-way door, it's all about the cost of reversing that decision. So how difficult or impossible or expensive or risky or reputationally

costly would be to reverse that decision, and from this point of view, the one-way door decisions are not always the exciting, sexy business decisions like going into a new market or coming up with a new product. Sometimes a very tactical decision can be a one-way door decision. Like he gives an example of deciding the standard height for all their warehouses. That's not a fancy decision in a way, but on the other hand, it is very impactful. And once you make that decision and build those warehouses, it's very difficult to reverse it. And one other thing he said is that three good decisions a day is enough because making a good decision, especially a one-way door decision, requires a lot of mental effort. And after a while, you get tired, and the quality of your decision-making process decreases. I think it's also important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So the normal way that we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. Um, it's we're doing this because it's like something else that

was done because it's it's it's kind of mentally easier to Reason by analogy, rather than from first principles. But by first principles, is kind of a physics way of looking at the world. And what that really means is you kind of boil things down to the most fundamental truths, and then reason up from there. Mhm, that takes a lot more mental energy. First principles is probably the core idea when it comes to Musk's decision-making process, and he talks about it a lot. This clip we just watched is just one example, a specific example of how they used the first principal Approach at SpaceX was when they wanted to buy aeronautic certified parts for the Rockets they were building, and they were finding that these parts are very expensive and difficult to get. So they went back to First principles by asking themselves the question, what are the fundamental specifications that these parts need to fulfill in terms of the really core attributes like strength and heat tolerance, and things like that, and once they understood those fundamental

requirements. They were able to find other parts on the market, which were not aeronautic certified, and therefore much cheaper and much more available, but they satisfied those fundamental requirements. And also, and more frequently, actually, actually, they were able to build their own parts internally with the understanding of what is the requirements they need to meet and then test them themselves to certify that they are suited for the intended use case. Another core Elon Musk decision-making idea is a very extreme version of less is more. He is really keen on getting hardcore and ruthless when it comes to his decision-making, for better or worse. So when he has a choice to make between two options, all other things being equal, he will tend to choose the simpler, uh, faster, more agile of those two options. You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever, because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you

the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference. Out of all the people we will talk about today, Steve Jobs is, in my opinion, the most artistically inclined of them, the most likely to follow intangibles such as aesthetics and taste. The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. I don't mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way. They don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their product. So that's what guided him. But how did he go about making decisions? His decision-making process was all about following the big vision, the big idea, the big design, and every little detail had to in a perfect way. So he was a perfectionist, a stubborn, stubborn perfectionist. Every little detail had to fall into its exact place as part of the bigger picture. He literally cried when the CD tray in the original iMac ended up having to be a

tray and not a slot as he wanted because there was just not a way to make it a slot at that time. Another person might say, whatever, it's just a tray, let it be a tray, let's stop thinking about it, let's just make a decision, but not him. He obsessed about these things to a very high degree. In retrospect, we can see that some of the things he obsessed about ended up being more important than others, but like he himself said, you cannot connect the dots looking forward, so at any given point in time when he was stubbornly defending any of these details, he wasn't 100% sure. I think, just my opinion, if that detail is going to be absolutely the essential one or maybe not, but you cannot know that, so he had to do it for everything just to be sure. He is known to have stated that when you innovate, you make mistakes, and when you see that you've made a mistake, you should quickly change course and do something else. And I think he actually did that a lot of the times, and I don't

think he was afraid to give something up if that something wasn't isn't working. Like when he got back to Apple in 1997, he famously simplified the product lineup of the company, killing most of the products which were not working. And like pretty much everyone else on this list, he doesn't like compromise. He views compromise as the worst way to make a decision. And if you think about it from a purely logical standpoint, it makes sense. Because what is compromise? Compromise is a social dynamic. We don't make compromises for the sake of the purity of the idea. Yeah, we make compromises for the sake of getting people on board or making everyone happy or sufficiently happy that they will support the decision. So the reason for compromise is social, not logical. Or viewed in an even less favorable way, compromise is politics. The reason to compromise is political, to get the support you need to have your proposal approved. When we look at these kinds of people like the ones we talked about, which are very stubborn visionary idea-driven people.

who started their own companies. It's easy to understand how they really don't like that, but you might reasonably ask yourself, Hey, Bezos, Musk, Jobs. They were Rockstar CEOs, founders of their own companies. They could afford to be uncompromising. I can't afford to be uncompromising, you know, at my job. I'm not Steve Jobs. I have to compromise. I cannot be like that. And I think that's true for most of us. But it's an interesting question to ponder if these people were uncompromising because they were powerful, or one of the things that allowed them to reach the level of power and success that they reached was that they were uncompromising. And our mystery fourth example, General Patton, the poster boy for Action. Let's do it, let's get it done, let's stop wasting time. A good plan violently executed today is better than a perfect plan next week. A big believer in time and speed as being crucial elements of decision making. For General Patton, speed is a virtue in itself. He also has

this very clear separation between deliberation and execution. Like, yeah, we can talk about it for a while and you can have concerns, but once we decide, it's all in. I don't think Paton would have liked over-theoretical points, overanalyzing things. Like we say in Romania, splitting the hair into four, getting into the very fine details of things. He would have gotten bored with that. He had a very strong pragmatic streak about him, and he wanted to talk about pragmatic actions that can be taken with pragmatic people that know how to take action. All in all, clearly the most action-oriented from all the examples we had today. And look, I'm not here to tell you that these people were perfect, that they never made mistakes, that you should admire them, or that you should even like them. Just to get it out of the way, obviously, their success was not solely a factor of their decision-making. There's many other factors which made them successful, some of them in their control and some of them out of their control. They were also

hardworking, determined, smart, persistent, and also they were occasionally helped by circumstance and luck. But the way they made decisions was a part of it, and one thing we can observe for all of them is a consistency in their decision-making style. A Steve Jobs decision from 1984 looks like a Steve Jobs decision from 2004, and it's the same for all the examples we took today. A decision-making style, a decision-making approach, framework, call it as you will, matters most when we don't have all the information. When the data is clear, a computer can make the decision, hell, an Excel file can make the decision. The decision may be difficult to accept, painful, devastating even, but if it's obvious, it's obvious. There's not a lot to debate about it, we just have to endure it. The difficult part comes when it's not clear, when it's kind of 50/50, when it's unclear if we should even make a decision, do something, or rather wait, as in decide not to yet decide. There's high stakes, but the information is

insufficient unclear ambiguous. These are the situations where decision-making becomes more than number-crunching. Our personalities, our life experience, our dreams, our values, our hopes, and aspirations, our fears - all that mixed together in The Human Condition. Part rationality, part psychology, part life experience, and we get decision-making styles. And today we looked at four examples from four Titans. What is your decision-making style?

4 Examples of Decision Making Styles

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