Where should I live? Is it time to get a new job? Which job candidate should I hire? What business strategy should I pursue? We spend the majority of our lives making decisions, both big and small. Yet, even though our success is largely determined by the choices that we make, very few of us are equipped with useful decision-making skills. Because of this, we often approach our choices tentatively, or even fearfully, and avoid giving them the time and thought required to put our best foot forward. In Smart Choices, John Hammond, Ralph Keeney, and Howard Raiffa--experts with over 100 years of experience resolving complex decision problems--offer a proven, straightforward, and flexible roadmap for making better and more impactful decisions, and offer the tools to achieve your goals in every aspect of your life. Their step-by-step, divide-and conquer approach will teach you how to: * Evaluate your plans * Break your potential decision into its key elements * Identify the key drivers that are most relevant to your goals * Apply systematic thinking * Use the right information to make the smartest choice Smart Choices doesn’t tell you what to decide; it tells you how. As you routinely use the process, you’ll become more confident in your ability to make decisions at work and at home. And, more importantly, by applying its time-tested methods, you’ll make better decisions going forward. Be proactive. Don’t wait until a decision is forced on you--or made for you. Seek out decisions that advance your long-term goals, values, and beliefs. Take charge of your life by making Smart Choices a lifetime habit.

This is the eBook version of the printed book. If the print book includes a CD-ROM, this content is not included within the eBook version. We tend to be somewhat risk averse as a species. We are systematic and logical, which sometimes makes us overcautious. Sure, look a decision squarely in the face. Consider it from every angle, but also focus on the intangibles that might be harder to place into a systematic equation of risks and returns. After you've done a careful analysis, step back. Maybe the crazy decision is the right one. Don't underestimate the power of deciding boldly. These essential truths help you to learn the brave way to make complex and critical decisions.

Learn why bad decisions happen to good managers—and how to make better ones. If you read nothing else on decision making, read these 10 articles. We’ve combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you and your organization make better choices and avoid common traps. Leading experts such as Ram Charan, Michael Mankins, and Thomas Davenport provide the insights and advice you need to: Make bold decisions that challenge the status quo Support your decisions with diverse data Evaluate risks and benefits with equal rigor Check for faulty cause-and-effect reasoning Test your decisions with experiments Foster and address constructive criticism Defeat indecisiveness with clear accountability

Praise for The Truth About Making Smart Decisions “The Truth About Making Smart Decisions offers a truly valuable and entertaining journey through the complex terrain of decision making. Robert Gunther combines a writer's gift of the pen with a keen understanding of human nature, drawing upon his own experiences, business anecdotes, and vignettes from other walks of life. His selection of traps, insights, and truths are edifying as well as amusing, and many readers will recognize themselves as he exposes our weaknesses, and occasional brilliance, as we carve the trajectory of our life one decision after the next.” Paul J. H. Schoemaker, Ph.D., coauthor of Decision Traps and Winning Decisions “Robert Gunther crystallizes years of expertise and insight in business writing into a book on probably life’s most important matter: decision making. How do you do it and how do you do it much better? He offers many tools to organize the mind and maximize your ability to be a leader and money maker.” Rick Rickertsen, Managing Partner of Pine Creek Partners and author of The Buyout Book and Sell Your Business Your Way “We make decision errors predictably, and Robert Gunther offers fifty ways of taking decisions more intelligently. The Truth About Making Smart Decisions is a concise and actionable guide for what to consider when facing critical choice points.” Michael Useem, Ph.D., Wharton Professor of Management and author of The Go Point: When It’s Time to Decide “If you think decision making is cut and dried, this book will make you think again. In The Truth About Making Smart Decisions, Robert Gunther offers challenging insights on how factors from sleep to intuition to emotions to mental models affect the quality of our decisions. He urges readers to take a broader view and raises issues that anyone should consider in making smarter decisions.” Yoram (Jerry) Wind, Ph.D., The Lauder Professor and Wharton Professor of Marketing, and coauthor of The Power of Impossible Thinking Everything you need to know to make smarter, better decisions—in business and in life! • The truth about learning from your mistakes and those of others • The truth about how sleep can help you make better decisions • The truth about the power of acting decisively This book brings together 50 powerful “truths” about making better decisions: real solutions for the tough challenges faced by every decision-maker, in business and in life. You'll discover how to systematically prepare to make better decisions...how to get the right information, without getting buried in useless data...how to minimize your risks, and then act decisively...how to handle your emotions...make better group decisions...profit from mistakes...and a whole lot more. This isn't "someone's opinion": it's a definitive, evidence-based guide to effective decision-making...a set of bedrock principles you can rely on no matter what kind of decisions you make!

Today's world is complex and getting more so each day. Huge multinational corporations, international crisis and fast breaking events require most people to make decisions on a daily basis without the tools to understand the long term impact that today's decision might create. Because most people have never really been trained in how to make important complex decisions most people rely on experience, and 'gut reaction' which is okay for many decisions, but not okay for decision that will have meaningful impact on organizations and individual. Decision makers need to develop the art and science of strategic decision making. Here, Professor Thomas Martin explains the need for decision makers to modify their thinking about how they deal with acquiring and analyzing information in each of the decision-making process steps. This approach requiring thinking modification will lengthen the process, make it more complex, and to some more arduous, but the comprehensiveness of the new thinking approach should lead to improved and more effective decision making. In this book, Dr. Martin presents a thinking modification framework that asserts that in the decision-making process, there are three situational states — a current state, future state, and a transitional state that one must deliberate in finding a solution. For each of these situational states, Martin develops an identical five-step process to determine the best decision to make. The steps of this process include: • Change-Needing Situational Analysis • Challenge Framing & Causal Analysis • Generating Solution Ideas • Choosing a Solution Set • Implementation and Aftermath Planning This book will appeal to decision makers, leaders, and students of management who want a specific framework that details the process behind making strategic, well-informed decisions.

The best way to improve your quality of life is through the decisions you make. This book teaches several fundamental decision-making skills, provides numerous applications and examples, and ultimately nudges you toward smarter decisions. These nudges frame more desirable decisions for you to face by identifying the objectives for your decisions and generating superior alternatives to those initially considered. All of the nudges are based on psychology and behavioral economics research and are accessible to all readers. The new concept of a decision opportunity is introduced, which involves creating a decision that you desire to face. Solving a decision opportunity improves your life, whereas resolving a decision problem only restores the quality of your life to that before the decision problem occurred. We all can improve our decision-making and reap the better quality of life that results. This book shows you how.

A Wall Street Journal bestseller, now in paperback. Poker champion turned decision strategist Annie Duke teaches you how to get comfortable with uncertainty and make better decisions. Even the best decision doesn't yield the best outcome every time. There's always an element of luck that you can't control, and there's always information hidden from view. So the key to long-term success (and avoiding worrying yourself to death) is to think in bets: How sure am I? What are the possible ways things could turn out? What decision has the highest odds of success? Did I land in the unlucky 10% on the strategy that works 90% of the time? Or is my success attributable to dumb luck rather than great decision making? Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned consultant, draws on examples from business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to share tools anyone can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions. For most people, it's difficult to say "I'm not sure" in a world that values and, even, rewards the appearance of certainty. But professional poker players are comfortable with the fact that great decisions don't always lead to great outcomes, and bad decisions don't always lead to bad outcomes. By shifting your thinking from a need for certainty to a goal of accurately assessing what you know and what you don't, you'll be less vulnerable to reactive emotions, knee-jerk biases, and destructive habits in your decision making. You'll become more confident, calm, compassionate, and successful in the long run.

Discover the essential thinking tools you’ve been missing with The Great Mental Models series by Shane Parrish, New York Times bestselling author and the mind behind the acclaimed Farnam Street blog and “The Knowledge Project” podcast. This first book in the series is your guide to learning the crucial thinking tools nobody ever taught you. Time and time again, great thinkers such as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited their success to mental models–representations of how something works that can scale onto other fields. Mastering a small number of mental models enables you to rapidly grasp new information, identify patterns others miss, and avoid the common mistakes that hold people back. The Great Mental Models: Volume 1, General Thinking Concepts shows you how making a few tiny changes in the way you think can deliver big results. Drawing on examples from history, business, art, and science, this book details nine of the most versatile, all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making and productivity. This book will teach you how to: Avoid blind spots when looking at problems. Find non-obvious solutions. Anticipate and achieve desired outcomes. Play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses, … and more. The Great Mental Models series demystifies once elusive concepts and illuminates rich knowledge that traditional education overlooks. This series is the most comprehensive and accessible guide on using mental models to better understand our world, solve problems, and gain an advantage.

Set yourself up for success in every season of life, for the rest of your life. Discover five game-changing questions to ask every time you make a major decision regarding your finances, relationships, career, and more. Good questions lead to better decisions. And your decisions determine the direction and quality of your life—they create the story of your life. And while nobody plans to complicate their life with bad decisions, far too many people have no plan to make good decisions. In Better Decisions, Fewer Regrets, Andy Stanley—pastor and bestselling author of Irresistible and Not In It To Win It—will help you learn from experience and stop making bad decisions by integrating five questions into every decision you make, big or small. This book will help you live differently by showing you how to: Develop a decision-making filter that reveals which choices will likely lead to positive results. Avoid selling yourself on bad ideas and making quick decisions when time is short. Find truth and clarity in any tricky decision. Improve relationships and heal division through better decisions. Discover the reasons behind your decisions so you can move forward with positive changes. Consider the long-term impact of your choices so you can write a life story worth celebrating. Easily identify any red flags that signal which decisions may result in future regrets.

We all face tough choices: business executives, community leaders, and family members all struggle with difficult decisions on a daily basis. What we decide reveals what really matters to us; how we decide determines whether we succeed or fail. Developed over twenty years in settings as diverse as hospital bedsides and corporate boardrooms, A Field Guide to Good Decisions provides the skills to make decisions that reflect your core values while respecting those of others, including the long-term implications for all participants. Illustrated through many real-life examples that will resonate with readers both professionally and personally, A Field Guide to Good Decisions offers practical tools and techniques for identifying individual and common goals, reaching consensus, and communicating the results effectively. The authors also show readers how to overcome common obstacles to good decision-making (psychological, cultural, and organizational). Ultimately, this book is about making decisions which, while not always a matter of life or death, nevertheless have a powerful effect on our sense of self, our credibility in the eyes of others, and the lives of those touched by the choices we make. Decision making is always personal. Each of us makes important decisions at work, in the community, and at home. When we face tough choices, what we decide reveals what really matters to us; how we decide determines whether we succeed or fail. Business executives, community leaders, and family members all struggle with difficult decisions: a senior management team makes an important choice about whether to pursue an acquisition; a baby-boomer decides whether to place an elderly parent in assisted living; a non-profit administrator considers laying off employees to have money and continue serving the community. For each, the steps toward a good decision are the same: know your values, engage others to understand theirs, and communicate with respect and candor. Simple in concept, not so easy in practice—but making a good decision demands nothing less. Developed over twenty years in settings as diverse as hopsital bedsides and corporate boardrooms, A Field Guide to Good Decisions provides the skills to make decisions that reflect your core values while respecting those of others, including the long-term implications for all participants. Illustrated through many real-life examples that will resonate with readers both professionally and personally, A Field Guide to Good Decisions offers practical tools and techniques for identifying individual and common goals, reaching consensus, and communicating the results effectively. The authors also show readers how to overcome common obstacles to good decision-making (psychological, cultural, and organizational). Ultimately, this book is about making decisions which, while not always a matter of life or death, nevertheless have a powerful effect on our sense of self, our credibility in the eyes of others, and the lives of those touched by the choices we make.