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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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Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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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 |
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ă 2002 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the July 2002
issue of Executive
Times Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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