Executive Times
		2007 Book Reviews
		The Go Point: When It's Time to Decide--Knowing What to Do and When to Do It by Michael Useem
Rating:			****
		(Highly Recommended)
		Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com
	Templates Wharton professor Michael Useem presents 50 principles, tools and illustrations in his new book, The Go Point: When It's Time to Decide--Knowing What to Do and When to Do It. Most executives can recall personal stories or those of others that involve decisions made too early, too late, or with the wrong information. The Go Point provides templates for the decision making process that have been field tested, and that are likely to work. What makes this highly recommended is how practical the advice is, and how many readers can put the advice to work at once. Here’s an excerpt, pp. 82-85: SMALL STEPS MAKE HARD DECISIONS EASIER Roberto Canessa set out to reach Chile—the most daunting challenge of his life—by telling himself that it would require only a hundred thousand steps. If he took several now, followed by another small batch, and another, in time they would add up. The figure was only theoretical, but by breaking the seemingly impossible down into achievable segments, he triggered his go point, and in ten days’ time, he arrived where few would have given him any chance of reaching. This device of breaking a big achievement into numerous small steps comes in many guises. Royal Robbins, one of America’s premier early rock climbers and now a clothing manufacturer, had become discouraged during his 1968 solo attempt of one of the celebrated rock faces of Yosemite National Park, the Muir Wall of El Capitan. After seven days, Robbins had concluded that he had insufficient energy and willpower to continue the difficult technical ascent up another 1,000 feet to the top of the 3,000-foot vertical granite face. Robbins was on the verge of rappelling down when he told himself that he should go up at least a few more feet before descending. “Why don’t you climb the next five feet?” he silently cajoled. “You can get down just as easily from five feet higher as from where you are, and you’ll have a new high point and a little more honor.” He made those five feet, then the next five feet, and then five more. After two more days of five feet at a time, he could finally see the top, and that tangibility was enough to take over as the driving force of his ascent. But getting there required hundreds of five-foot steps, each a proximate goal to the larger one. “How do you climb a mountain when you can’t see the summit?” he asked himself. “By setting targets you can see and hit.” They are the small “steps to the dream.” Without them he would have fallen short of what became one of the celebrated moments of Yosemite climbing history. ^19 SURMOUNTING THE INSURMOUNTABLE Another variation of getting into the game through proximate goals is offered by Dean Karnazes, one of the most extreme runners of his era. Karnazes regularly competes in 100-mile events and once completed a marathon to the South Pole. One of the greatest challenges he ever set for himself came in a 199-mile race called The Relay. The event is intended for teams of twelve runners who take turns completing thirtysix segments of 5V2 miles each, but Karnazes decided to run it entirely himself. Cheered on by other contestants as the one-runner “Dean Team,” he started the race at 5 p.m. on a Friday at the northern end of the Napa Valley of California and ran through the night, all day Saturday, and well into Sunday on his way to the finish line in Santa Cruz. By 3 a.m. on Sunday, though, Karnazes had lost the will to go on. He sat slumped on a curb at mile 155 in Silicon Valley after nearly being hit by a vehicle. When he told himself he had to get running again despite his utter exhaustion, his muscles would not respond. He thought he might have to call 911, and he decided that he wanted to be standing when the police arrived. “If I can just rise to my feet,” he said to himself, “I’ll be satisfied. Baby steps, I thought. Just stand up.” He did, and then he told himself to reach a reflector some 20 feet up the road, and then a bush 50 feet ahead. His momentum restored, Karnazes crossed the finish line Sunday afternoon, 46 hours and 17 minutes after his start on Friday. The concept of running one 199-mile course would stop virtually everybody, but the idea of running thousands of small increments of a few dozen feet powered him through at the end.^20 A still different incarnation of the same device carried Johannah Christensen through the arduous yearlong task of assembling a program for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the annual event that since 1970 has been bringing together many of the world’s premier business and political luminaries for five days of discussion and debate on leading economic, political, and technological issues. As program manager, Christensen held responsibility for helping to create a lineup of speakers, panels, and workshops on topics ranging from world trade to nuclear proliferation, from microfinance to corporate governance, from religious faith to global terrorism. The 2005 meeting was typical of the challenge. The agenda included 217 separate sessions and events for a total audience of some three thousand attendees, many top executives of the globe’s leading companies or ranking officials of the world’s major countries. In attendance were Microsoft founder Bill Gates, then Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, and Citigroup CEO Charles Prince; British prime minister Tony Blair, former U.S. president Bill Clinton, and Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko; and actors Angelina Jolie, Richard Gere, and Sharon Stone. Adding to Johannah Christensen’s travails was intense jockeying among many of the powerful for prominent speaking roles at the best times during the five-day affair. The forum arranged, for instance, to give French president Jacques Chirac and German chancellor Gerhard Schröder solo speaking slots on a prime afternoon. Planning for the annual meeting commences a year in advance. Laid out on charts and tables in Christensen’s office in the World Economic Forum’s headquarters in Geneva, the event initially looks simply “insurmountable,” she said. But her tactic for getting from objective to reality is to break the vast scale of the enterprise again into hundreds of small, definable steps and then to remind herself constantly from past experience that the participants “will all show up, they’ll have a great time, and then they’ll leave.” By proceeding in small increments without losing sight of the larger goal, Christensen helped herself stay in the game. Some three thousand mostly powerful personalities did arrive in Davos in January and were met with a well-orchestrated program of sessions and speakers. The “insurmountable” task of orchestrating a hydra-like gathering point for what the British call “the great and the good” came off well.^21 There’s compelling reading in The Go Point, especially in the stories Useem tells, including the description of the Storm King Mountain fire in Colorado in 1994, and the analysis of the battle of Gettysburg. By entering the minds of other decision makers, readers can be led toward making better decisions. Steve Hopkins, March 23, 2007
Buy The Go Point @ amazon.com				Go To Hopkins & Company Homepage
Go to 2007 Book Shelf				Go to Executive Times Archives
Go to The Big Book Shelf: All Reviews
	2007 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the April 2007 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Go Point.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 Phone: 708-466-4650 • Fax: 708-386-8687 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com www.hopkinsandcompany.com