An essential guide for any business leader looking to hone, develop and master the art of judgment. The success of any organization or individual depends upon making good decisions, arrived at through the use of a sound judgment. Too often, this elusive characteristic has been misperceived as an unchangeable, entrenched element of our character, over which we have little control. In fact, judgment is an art – one that can be honed, developed and mastered. In The Art of Judgment, John Adair draws upon his decades of experience and expertise to provide a practical and fascinating insight into how you can harness the full potential of your judgment. These in-depth methods are summarised in 10 key principles, which include: - Thinking to Some Purpose - Experience – the Seedbed - Truth – the Leading Star - How to Share Decisions - The Role of Values With the divisiveness of public discourse and the complexities of modern business, it is more difficult than ever to be sure that you're making the right decision. Adair provides a clear pathway to improving your judgment, beginning with an exploration of the machinations behind decision-making, before demonstrating how you can develop a stronger understanding and control of your judgment. This is an essential companion for any business leader interested in making the best decisions, whether personal or for their organization. Good judgment is the secret behind any success, and also has the potential to accelerate one's own career. This book provides insight, expertise and inspiration for anyone looking to cultivate and develop their art of judgment.

This classic book by Sir Geoffrey Vickers first published 30 years ago speaks to both the student//academic and the practitioner interested in understanding decision-making in organizational settings. As the biographical essay elucidates, Vickers' ideas arose from his rich and multifaceted career as a practitioner. His work provides for the integration of theory and practice that is without parallel anywhere in the literature. Written in a lively and accessible style The Art of Judgment continues to be a seminal work for scholars seeking to develop an interpretive and critical account of management and organization. This work is a study which transcends both a narrow and scientific view of administrative behaviour an

Artistic Judgement sketches a framework for an account of art suitable to philosophical aesthetics. It stresses differences between artworks and other things; and locates the understanding of artworks both in a narrative of the history of art and in the institutional practices of the art world. Hence its distinctiveness lies in its strong account of the difference between, on the one hand, the judgement and appreciation of art and, on the other, the judgement and appreciation of all the other things in which we take an aesthetic interest. For only by acknowledging this contrast can one do justice to the importance regularly ascribed to art. The contrast is explained by appealing to an occasion-sensitive account of understanding, drawn from Charles Travis directly, but with Gordon Baker (and Wittgenstein) as also proximate rather than remote. On this basis, it argues, first, that we need to offer accounts of key topics only as far as questions might be raised in respect of them (hence, not exceptionlessly); and, second, that we should therefore defend the view that the meaning of artworks can be changed by later events (the historical character of art, or forward retroactivism) and that art has an institutional character, understood broadly on the lines of Terry Diffey’s Republic of Art. Besides providing a general framework, Artistic Judgement also explores the applications of the ideas to specific artworks or classes of them.

This book is about elicitation: the facilitation of the quantitative expression of subjective judgement about matters of fact, interacting with subject experts, or about matters of value, interacting with decision makers or stakeholders. It offers an integrated presentation of procedures and processes that allow analysts and experts to think clearly about numbers, particularly the inputs for decision support systems and models. This presentation encompasses research originating in the communities of structured probability elicitation/calibration and multi-criteria decision analysis, often unaware of each other’s developments. Chapters 2 through 9 focus on processes to elicit uncertainty from experts, including the Classical Method for aggregating judgements from multiple experts concerning probability distributions; the issue of validation in the Classical Method; the Sheffield elicitation framework; the IDEA protocol; approaches following the Bayesian perspective; the main elements of structured expert processes for dependence elicitation; and how mathematical methods can incorporate correlations between experts. Chapters 10 through 14 focus on processes to elicit preferences from stakeholders or decision makers, including two chapters on problems under uncertainty (utility functions), and three chapters that address elicitation of preferences independently of, or in absence of, any uncertainty elicitation (value functions and ELECTRE). Two chapters then focus on cross-cutting issues for elicitation of uncertainties and elicitation of preferences: biases and selection of experts. Finally, the last group of chapters illustrates how some of the presented approaches are applied in practice, including a food security case in the UK; expert elicitation in health care decision making; an expert judgement based method to elicit nuclear threat risks in US ports; risk assessment in a pulp and paper manufacturer in the Nordic countries; and elicitation of preferences for crop planning in a Greek region.

Another fascinating book by the author of Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling: a saga of artistic rivalry and cultural upheaval in the decade leading to the birth of Impressionism. If there were two men who were absolutely central to artistic life in France in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were Edouard Manet and Ernest Meissonier. While the former has been labelled the “Father of Impressionism” and is today a household name, the latter has sunk into obscurity. It is difficult now to believe that in 1864, when this story begins, it was Meissonier who was considered the greatest French artist alive and who received astronomical sums for his work, while Manet was derided for his messy paintings of ordinary people and had great difficulty getting any of his work accepted at the all-important annual Paris Salon. Manet and Meissonier were the Mozart and Salieri of their day, one a dangerous challenge to the establishment, the other beloved by rulers and the public alike for his painstakingly meticulous oil paintings of historical subjects. Out of the fascinating story of their parallel careers, Ross King creates a lens through which to view the political tensions that dogged Louis-Napoleon during the Second Empire, his ignominious downfall, and the bloody Paris Commune of 1871. At the same time, King paints a wonderfully detailed and vivid portrait of life in an era of radical social change. When Manet painted Dejeuner sur l’herbe or Olympia, he shocked not only with his casual brushstrokes but with his subject matter: top-hatted white-collar workers (and their mistresses) were not considered suitable subjects for ‘Art.’ Ross King shows how, benign as they might seem today, these paintings changed the course of history. The struggle between Meissonier and Manet to see their paintings achieve pride of place at the Salon was not just about artistic competitiveness, it was about how to see the world. Full of fantastic tidbits of information and a colourful cast of characters that includes Baudelaire, Courbet and Zola, with walk-on parts for Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cezanne, The Judgment of Paris casts new light on the birth of Impressionism and takes us to the heart of a time in which the modern French identity was being forged.

This collection of essays and discussions examines the role of judgment in art writing within the context of a renewed interest in the efficacy and function of contemporary art criticism.

Good Judgment, based upon the author's experience as a lawyer, law professor, and judge, explores the role of the judge and the art of judging. Engaging with the American, English, and Commonwealth literature on the role of the judge in the common law tradition, Good Judgment addresses the following questions: What exactly do judges do? What is properly within their role and what falls outside? How do judges approach their decision-making task? In an attempt to explain and reconcile two fundamental features of judging, namely judicial choice and judicial discipline, this book explores the nature and extent of judicial choice in the common law legal tradition and the structural features of that tradition that control and constrain that element of choice. As Sharpe explains, the law does not always provide clear answers, and judges are often left with difficult choices to make, but the power of judicial choice is disciplined and constrained and judges are not free to decide cases according to their own personal sense of justice. Although Good Judgment is accessibly written to appeal to the non-specialist reader with an interest in the judicial process, it also tackles fundamental issues about the nature of law and the role of the judge and will be of particular interest to lawyers, judges, law students, and legal academics.

Teachers of literature make judgments about value. They tell their students which works are powerful, beautiful, surprising, strange, or insightful—and thus, which are more worthy of time and attention than others. Yet the field of literary studies has largely disavowed judgments of artistic value on the grounds that they are inevitably rooted in prejudice or entangled in problems of social status. For several decades now, professors have called their work value-neutral, simply a means for students to gain cultural, political, or historical knowledge. ?Michael W. Clune’s provocative book challenges these objections to judgment and offers a positive account of literary studies as an institution of aesthetic education. It is impossible, Clune argues, to separate judgments about literary value from the practices of interpretation and analysis that constitute any viable model of literary expertise. Clune envisions a progressive politics freed from the strictures of dogmatic equality and enlivened by education in aesthetic judgment, transcending consumer culture and market preferences. Drawing on psychological and philosophical theories of knowledge and perception, Clune advocates for the cultivation of what John Keats called “negative capability,” the capacity to place existing criteria in doubt and to discover new concepts and new values in artworks. Moving from theory to practice, Clune takes up works by Keats, Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Samuel Beckett, and Thomas Bernhard, showing how close reading—the profession’s traditional key skill—harnesses judgment to open new modes of perception.

Spanning a period of 35 years, this collection of essays includes some of the classic works of one of the most distinquished and influential philosophers working in the field of decision theory and the theory of knowledge.