Excerpt from A Leadership Primer by General Colin Powell

Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.

The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them.
They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care.
Either case is a failure of leadership.

Less effective middle managers endorsed the sentiment,
"If I haven't explicitly been told 'yes,' I can't do it,"
whereas the good ones believed,
"If I haven't explicitly been told 'no,' I can."
There's a world of difference between these two points of view.

Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it.

Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.

Part I: Use the formula P=40 to 70, in which P stands for the probability of success and the numbers indicate the percentage of information acquired.
Part II: "Once the information is in the 40 to 70 range, go with your gut.

Procrastination in the name of reducing risk actually increases risk.