Synopsis
When a group makes a decision, that decision carries a lot more weight than when just one person does it. Think of the founding fathers of the American constitution and how much power and influence their ideas have had in the entire world for more than two hundred years. Also think of gravity, a universal force brought about by an enormous number of minute particles that band together to make a universal law. Together, they create a massive force, a law of nature; alone they can barely be noticed. That is how our minds work by deciding together to create a power that transcends our individuality. Group decision making is a gift and an opportunity to create greater influence through the working together of many minds. This book shows how to use the Analytic Hierarchy Process for hierarchical decision making and the Analytic Network Process for decision making in networks with dependence and feedback in group decision making. Part I discusses the group and the decision and shows the importance of using a structured process, particularly for those high value decisions involving many powerful parties with different interests. It discusses how to facilitate a group decision, combine individual judgments and smooth differences to arrive at a decision that everyone can live with and get behind. Part II discusses the group in planning and how to draw out differences. Part III is about conflict resolution and Part IV is about how to address significant issues that come up in group decision making and shows that it is possible to construct an overall group preference.
About the Author
Thomas L. Saaty is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches at the Pitt Graduate School of Business. He is best-known as being the modern mathematician who figured out a way to measure intangibles, and is the inventor, architect, and primary theoretician of the Analytic Hierarchy Process, a decision-making framework used for large-scale, multiparty, multi-criteria decision analysis, and of the Analytic Network Process, its generalization to decisions with dependence and feedback. Saaty is a member of National Academy of Engineering (2005), and in 2008 he received the Impact Prize from the Operations Research Society INFORMS for how the AHP has revolutionized the way we resolve complex decision problems. The publication of his books on the Analytic Hierarchy Process and the release of PC-based software such as SuperDecisions and web-based collaborative software such as Decision Lens have led to widespread dissemination of the process. The AHP has been applied worldwide to help decision makers in every conceivable decision context across both the public and private sectors, with literally thousands of reported applications.
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