Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions - Hardcover

Hammond, John S.; Keeney, Ralph L.; Raiffa, Howard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0875848575 ISBN 13: 9780875848570

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press, 1998

Synopsis

Making smart choices is a fundamental life skill, relevant to anyone: managers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, students, parents, young, old. Your decisions will shape and influence the course of your professional career and the quality of your personal life—the ability to make good decisions is a key factor in determining whether you achieve your goals. To help you increase your chances of finding satisfying solutions, Smart Choices blends the art and science of decision making into a straightforward, proven approach for making tough choices. Smart Choices doesn't tell you what to decide; it tells you how. Authors Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa, among the world's best-known experts on resolving complex decision problems, blend the art and the science of decision making into accessible steps that lead you to consider your choices both intuitively and analytically. Here, for the first time, is a flexible system that can be applied to business decisions, to personal decisions, to family decisions—to any decision you make.

About this title

About the Author

John S. Hammond is an internationally known decision-making consultant specializing in negotiation and corporate strategy, and a former professor at Harvard Business School.

From the Inside Flap

Where should I live? Which house should I buy?
* Is it time to change careers-or go back to graduate school?
* What mutual fund should I select to meet my financial goals?
* Which job candidate should I hire?
Making smart choices is a fundamental life skill, relevant to everyone: businesspeople, doctors, lawyers, teachers, students, parents, young, old. Your decisions shape the course of your professional career and the quality of your personal life. Yet few people learn real decision-making skills. Consequently we approach our choices tentatively, or even fearfully, and avoid giving decisions the time and thought required to turn them to our best advantage. Smart Choices offers the first straightforward, easy-to-follow process designed to improve the way you make business decisions, family decisions, personal decisions-any decision that can help you reach your goals.

Authors Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa, among the world's best-known experts on resolving complex decision problems, have created a user-friendly set of techniques for assessing your options more clearly and effectively, ultimately empowering you to make smarter choices. Their step-by-step procedures combine solid research with practical experience and common sense to help you specify your objectives, identify creative alternatives, make reasoned tradeoffs, clarify uncertainties, and evaluate the risks. Smart Choices doesn't tell you what to decide; it tells you how. As you routinely use the Smart Choices process, you'll become more confident in your ability to make good decisions and to explain them to others. More important, you'll make better decisions. Be proactive. Don't wait until a decision is forced on you-or made for you. Seek out decision opportunities that advance your long-range goals, values, and core beliefs. Take charge of your life by making Smart Choices a lifetime habit.

Reviews

In 1966, the Lovin' Spoonful had a #2 hit with "Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?" Two years later, Raiffa answered that question for a generation of academics with his book Decision Analysis, whose argumentAthat decision-making skills can be learned and applied as a discipline of their ownAmade Raiffa deeply influential in management and social science. Raiffa (a former professor at Harvard Business School), his longtime associate Hammond (a professor of management and engineering at the University of Southern California) and Ralph Keeney (The Art and Science of Negotiation) here explain decision-analysis techniques and stratagems for the benefit of nonspecialists. They provide substantial, straightforward explanations of concepts (risk tolerance, sunk costs, desirability curves) that sound arcane but may help readers to buy the right car, choose a mutual fund, decide on a school, or plan a vacation. Unfortunately, the lingo of self-help often substitutes for the jargon of management consulting, as when Raiffa's famous five decision steps become the trendy acronym PrOACT. And the example problems can seem clich?d, two-dimensional or implausible, even when based on fact. Nevertheless, recommendations like "Remember that the value of an incremental change depends on what you start with" and "Make sure your subordinates reflect your organization's risk tolerance in their decisions" are, at the least, good reminders that the logic of decision making is often counterintuitive; at best, they are an important, useful set of insights.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The three authors, all of whom come from academic backgrounds and specialize in decision science, argue that "making smart choices is a fundamental life skill" that can be taught. They provide a practical model for decision making and demonstrate that it can be applied in both personal and business situations. They show that the key is to break the decision into its individual elements, identify those that are most important, and analyze potential outcomes. The authors also stress that decisions should be made before they turn into problems. Their so-called PROACTive approach can be broken down mnemonically. Identify the PRoblem, specify the Objectives, create Alternatives, understand the Consequences, and weigh the Trade-offs. Following these steps, one must clarify uncertainty, assess risks, and be aware of what other choices a decision might create. From choosing a career to planning an employee party, the authors use a wide range of examples to demonstrate their approach. David Rouse

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0875848575
• ISBN 13: 9780875848570
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256