Knowing the importance of luck, you should be particularly suspicious when highly consistent patterns emerge from the comparison of successful and less successful firms. In the presence of randomness, regular patterns can only be mirages.

An executive might have a very strong intuition that a given product has promise, without considering the probability that a rival is already ahead in developing the same product.

Experts don't know exactly where the boundaries of their expertise are.

Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don't know the odds. It's a big difference.

The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.

In strategic decisions, I'd be really concerned about overconfidence.

Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.