Bulletproof Decisions: How Executives Can Get It Right, Every Time

We are told from a young age that we should strive to make the right decisions, but we aren’t taught exactly how to do this. Every day, we make over 35,000 decisions in our personal and professional lives. How many of those decisions do we get right? This book will help business executives systematically tackle these 35,000 decisions. Executives are forced to make critical decisions that impact their lives, their employees’ lives, and the lives of their customers. Decisions like what products to create, who should be hired, and what divisions to shut down are all commonplace in the executive suite.

This book offers three strategies for dealing with decisions: problem-solving techniques, routines, and decision-making frameworks. Each strategy is designed to help readers achieve more clarity, gain time back, and improve the quality of their decisions. The first one focuses on helping readers solve the right problem instead of wasting time on the wrong one. The second strategy helps deal with decisions that need to be made once but can then be executed regularly. The third and final strategy provides a three-step framework for making the most important decisions in their lives.

The focus of the author’s work is on helping readers use data to make better decisions. This book gives readers the tools to convert the insights they learn from their data into actionable decisions.

Ruben Ugarte is a Data Strategist at Practico Analytics, where he has worked with 75+ companies from 5 continents and all company stages, including Cornell University, Jive, Destination BC, and Circle. He has helped them use data to make higher-quality decisions and unlock hidden insights.

For example, one of his clients is the British Columbia government, who needed help sorting through all their data to determine how to adapt their tourism marketing due to COVID-19. Another example is Paymark, which is the largest payment processor in New Zealand. They needed help figuring out how to best support their small merchant clients as they dealt with ongoing lockdowns.

All his clients need to make decisions with limited resources and rapidly changing conditions. Ruben provides them with pragmatic strategies and frameworks that work in the real world. These are the same ideas that will be covered in this book.

He also maintains a popular blog that has been read by over 100,000 readers. Ruben’s ideas and work have been featured in industry-leading blogs, such as ConversionXL and Openview Labs. He resides in Vancouver, BC, and spends his free time exploring new bike routes.