Jeff Bezos explains the perfect way to make risky business decisions

1. Learn to work with just enough data, aiming for most of what you need (70%) instead of gunning for near certainty (90%).

2. Get comfortable with uncertainty by staying flexible after the decision is made. “Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors,” he said. For those decisions that can be easily undone, use “a light-weight process.” He wrote that you can tell if it’s a lightweight decision by answering the question “So what if you’re wrong?”

3. Instead of focusing on avoiding mistakes by making perfect decisions, become a master of “quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”

4. Finally, for the biggies — those decisions that are not reversible or that have a big effect on customers, employees, or partners — turn the idea of buy-in/approval on its head. Go with “disagree and commit.”

Sounds pretty familiar, although this description of the approach is much more calm and collected than the way you might hear it told from an exhausted and bewildered employee of a startup in the throes of runaway growth.