It’s safe to assume that anything useful in this book is someone else’s idea, and that my main contribution is to put the mosaic of what I’ve learned from others who came before me out there for the world.

Even when we get the big decisions directionally right, we’re not guaranteed to get the results we want.

We don’t think of ordinary moments as decisions. No one taps us on the shoulder as we react to a comment by a coworker to tell us that we’re about to pour gasoline or water onto this flame.

When everything is on your shoulders and the cost of being wrong is high, I told her, you tend to focus on what’s right instead of who’s right. The more I’d given up wanting to be right, the better the outcomes I had. I didn’t care about getting the credit; I cared about getting the results.

From that point on, whenever he discussed something with anyone at work, he would start by offering his impressions of how the other person saw things. Then he would ask, “What did I miss?

A mentor of mine once taught me that the best way to avoid finding the perfect solution to the wrong problem at work, when time allows is to hold two separate meetings: one to define the problem, and one to come up with the solution.