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Winning Decisions: Getting It Right the First Time by J. Edward Russo and Paul J.H. Schoemaker

 

Rating: (Recommended)

 

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Think!

Executives looking for ideas on how to improve the effectiveness of individual and group decision making will find practical suggestions and tools in Winning Decisions by J. Edward Russo and Paul J.H. Schoemaker. The authors present four stages of decision-making: framing; intelligence gathering; concluding; and learning from experience. The sections of the book present each phase or stage, and provide the general principles drawn primarily from cognitive science research. Readers can examine lessons learned by other executives and organizations, and test out worksheets, tools and exercises to enhance critical thinking and decision-making skills. Here’s an excerpt from the final chapter on the decision process for hiring a COO used by an Internet company executive, Richard Roll, CEO of RealHome.com:

“This brings us to a lesson that we cannot repeat often enough: our systematic decision-making process provides a guidelines, not a recipe. Use the techniques we offer to avoid distortions and biases, but don’t do more than you have to. In coming to conclusions, decision-makers need two elements – good alternatives, and a systematic way to evaluate them. In this case Roll didn’t have many good alternative. But he did have a well-developed decision frame for evaluation, a frame that he refined throughout the interview process, becoming increasingly clear on the relative value of each criterion. The last sep, were he to use a formal decision weighting approach, would have been to plug in the numbers. But given his limited alternatives, Roll didn’t need such a detailed analysis to separate his ‘best’ alternative from the merely ‘second best.’ Doing the math would only have confirmed the obvious.”

I like the practical approach taken in this book to acquiring better tools, and then applying them in a measured and appropriate way. So often, management book authors prescribe a methodology that becomes impossible to implement in an executive’s real world. Winning Decisions contains lots of practical suggestions that each of us can try out and use easily, scaled however we choose. Executives may want to use this book as a coaching tool to help improve the decision making of direct reports.

Steve Hopkins, June 19, 2002

 

ă 2002 Hopkins and Company, LLC

 

The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the July 2002 issue of Executive Times

 

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