to create better behavior, you have to twin reminders of responsibility with another psychological tweak: show people in positions of authority the costs and consequences of their actions. If those in authority aren’t made deeply uncomfortable by human faces right in front of them from time to time, they’re probably not doing their job right.

having an intellectual understanding of responsibility will not guarantee a magical translation into good behavior.

History is littered with leaders who received undeserved praise because of a good PR campaign.

people who are good at getting into power are also good at creating narratives that cast them in a better light than reality.

The lesson is simple: Don’t always focus on results and outcomes. Instead, scrutinize the decision-making process much more carefully.

if you reward someone for a job well done—when their success was due to luck—then you’re more likely to end up with a costly failure from a bad but lucky leader.

The real world is mind-bogglingly complex. Minor variations and flukes can drastically shift outcomes. That causes us to wrongly attribute failure to some excellent ideas while heaping praise on terrible ideas that produced improbable success.

Rotation isn’t a miracle. But it helps. And it works best when a higher proportion of the people in the organization or political party or police department are already honest and decent.

Rotation is also important for an unexpected reason, related to something called the Peter Principle. The concept, which was coined by its namesake, Laurence J. Peter, asserts that people tend to rise to the “level of their incompetence.”