Book Titles

Decision makers need a realistic assessment of the costs and benefits of a proposal before making the final decision to approve it.

Organizations face the challenge of controlling the tendency of executives competing for resources to present overly optimistic plans.

When forecasting the outcomes of risky projects, executives too easily fall victim to the planning fallacy. In its grip, they make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities.

…people often (but not always) take on risky projects because they are overly optimistic about the odds they face.

Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships…

We… tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which fosters optimistic overconfidence.

Because optimistic bias can be both a blessing and a risk, you should be both happy and wary if you are temperamentally optimistic.

…evidence suggests that an optimistic bias plays a role – sometimes the dominant role – whenever individuals or institutions voluntarily take on significant risks.

When action is needed, optimism, even of the mildly delusional variety, may be a good thing.

One of the benefits of an optimistic temperament is that it encourages persistence in the face of obstacles. But persistence can be costly.