ABSTRACT
Effective people concentrate on the important ones. They try to think through what is strategic and generic, rather than “solve problems.” They try to make the few important decisions on the highest level of conceptual understanding. Effective people know when a decision has to be based on principle and when it should be made on the merits of the case and pragmatically. Most of the problems that come up in the course of the executive’s work are of this nature. Inventory decisions in a business, for instance, are not “decisions.” Clear thinking about the boundary conditions is needed to identify the most dangerous of all possible decisions: the one that might—just might—work if nothing whatever goes wrong. The more concisely and clearly boundary conditions are stated, the greater the likelihood that the decision will indeed be an effective one and will accomplish what it set out to do.
