Success Quote by John Henry Patterson

The line flatters decisiveness while quietly admitting how crude that virtue can be. Patterson defines an executive not by vision, empathy, or even competence, but by a single mechanical output: decisions. It reads like a compliment you’d engrave on a corporate plaque, yet it smuggles in a more bracing truth about power in organizations: action is often rewarded over accuracy, and certainty can outrank insight.

The repetition does the work. “Always decides” and “always decides” forms a kind of corporate drumbeat, the cadence of meetings that must end with a call, any call. The little hinge phrase, “sometimes he decides correctly,” is almost a shrug. Patterson isn’t romanticizing leaders as wise; he’s describing them as necessary. In a bureaucracy, indecision is contagious. Someone has to cut the knot, accept imperfect information, and force the machine to move. The executive becomes less a genius and more a human deadline.

That framing makes sense for Patterson’s era and profile. As a late-19th/early-20th-century businessman (and a key figure in modern sales management), he lived in the dawning age of scale: national markets, expanding workforces, systems that punished hesitation. His ethic is managerial, not philosophical. The subtext is also a warning: if your job is to decide, you’ll be judged on decisiveness even when the correct choice is unclear. The quote normalizes error as the price of authority, and it hints at the darker corollary: in many institutions, the worst sin isn’t being wrong, it’s pausing long enough to look uncertain.