"Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable."

Michael (Moneyball) Lewis has a profile of President Obama in the current issue of Vanity Fair (Obama's Way).  Lewis writes about the role of leader as the solver of imperfect problems.  Obama had this observation that is true of the CEO, the Prime Minister, the Pope - - the list is a long one on who gets the say on solutions to imperfect problems in an imperfect world - -

But if you happen to be president just now, what you are faced with, mainly is not a public-relations problem but an endless string of decisions.  Putting it the way George W. Bush did sounded silly but he was right: the president is a decider.  Many if not most of his decisions are thrust upon the president, out of the blue, by events beyond his control; oil spills, financial panics, pandemics, earthquakes, fires, coups, invasions, underwear bombers, movie-theater shooters, and on and on and on.  They don't order themselves neatly for his consideration but come in waves, jumbled on top of each other.  "Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable," Obama said at one point.  "Otherwise, someone else would have solved it.  So you wind up dealing with probabilities.  Any given decision you make you'll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that is isn't going work.  You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision.  You can't be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out."  On top of all this, after you have made your decision, you need to feign total certainty about it.  People being led do not want to think probabilistically.