It seems thrifty to believe ... that asking just one expert is enough ... because it is usually quite expensive to obtain ... expert advice, [but] it is useful to remind ourselves that specialists who are top experts often disagree on what is best ... each having his or her own good reasons.... Remember that experts are only human and can make bad mistakes, like anyone else.
— Daniel D Wheeler and Irving L Janis, A Practical Guide for Making Decisions, 1980

 

Our brains appear programmed with predispositions to believe what authority figures tell us.
— David L Weiner, Brain Tricks: How to Cope with the Dark Side of Your Brain ... and Win the Ultimate Mind Game, 1993

 

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If you are the head of an organization, try not to be affected by sycophancy.
— (Norman) Stuart Sutherland, Irrationality: Why We Don't Think Straight!, 1992

 

Managers need to recognize that their employees react to perceptions, not to reality. Individuals who perceive appraisals as biased or wage levels as low will behave as if those conditions actually exist. Employees naturally organize and interpret what they see; inherent in this process is the potential for perceptual distortion. [Managers must] manage learning ... [and] realize that employees will look to them as models. For example, managers [with bad on-the-job habits] should expect employees to read the message they're sending and model their behavior accordingly.
— Stephen P Robbins, Essentials of Organizational Behavior (6th ed.), 1999

 

Nothing quenches motivation as quickly as a slovenly boss.
— Peter F Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, 1974

 

The information-processing view of people is quite idealized. People are usually described one-dimensionally — assumed to be on-task, rational, dedicated and loyal to the company.
— William J Clancey, "The Knowledge Level Reinterpreted: Modeling Socio-Technical Systems," 1993, in Knowledge Acquisition as Modeling, by K M Ford and J. M. Bradshaw (Editors). Also in Special issue of International Journal of Intelligent Systems, January 1993:

http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/03/12/cog00000312-00/125.htm

 

People will only do the effort to learn and retain an idea that can help them to reach their goals.
— Francis Heylighen, Objective, Subjective and Intersubjective Selectors of Knowledge: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/papers/knowledgeselectors.html, 1997.

 

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To be successful in the business world we need to check our bright ideas against the territory. Our enthusiasm must be restrained long enough for us to analyze our ideas critically.
— Ken Keyes, Jr, Taming Your Mind: A Guide to Sound Decisions, 1975

 

... people tend to be insufficiently conservative or 'regressive’ when making predictions....[For example] shareholders expect a company that has had a banner year to earn as much or more the next [even in the absence of any change in product(s)/service(s) offered and company policy/procedure(s) implemented]. The predicted performance is simply matched to [the observed] performance without taking into account the likely [subsequent] regression — that extreme values on one of two related variables tend to be matched by less extreme values on the other.... When one score is extreme, its counterpart tends to be closer to the average. It is a simple statistical fact.
— Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life, 1991

 

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This web page was last updated on Monday, February 2, 2004.
http://www.mdpme.com/cognition5.htm

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