By the time executives get to high levels, they are good at making others feel confident in their judgment, even if there's no strong basis for the judgment.

Society's epitome of credibility is John Wayne, who sizes up a situation and says, "Here's what I'm going to do" - and you follow him.

You need to take your gut feeling as an important data point, but then you have to consciously and deliberately evaluate it, to see if it makes sense in this context.

The most valuable insight I have made about how people make decisions is that when they become skilled they don't have to make decisions - choices between options. Instead, they can draw on experience and the patterns they have acquired to recognize what to do, ignoring other options. This is the basis of the Recognition-Primed Decision (RPD) model my colleagues and I described thirty years ago.

If you are committed to the change, you're going to have to sideline the skeptics, or at least keep them under control. There may be a temptation to move them out but skeptics have a value - flagging weaknesses in the plan. Ideally, you will enlist their critical stance by challenging them to find ways to improve the plan as you go forward.

You shouldn't trust the judgments of stock brokers picking individual stocks.

People sometimes are so confident in their flawed beliefs that they get stuck - fixated - and as a result are blinded to insights that are right in front of them.