Making Great Decisions in Business and Life

The phrase 'work smarter, not harder' has been repeatedly ridiculed in the Dilbert comic strip and elsewhere, not because it is a bad idea, but because it is thrown like a brick lifesaver to drowning employees. To tell someone to work smarter is like telling someone to be happier, healthier, and richer. It's not much help to merely repeat the objective; what people need is a plan for achieving the objective. In Making Great Decisions, we show our readers how to achieve their objectives. We write to help those in business and those in the business of life--i.e., everyone--to work smarter. Our ideas are both simple and powerful. We offer a better way to look at problems so that the solutions are easier to find. We help supplement our readers' clear thinking by summarizing some of the most powerful techniques we have discovered.

David R. Henderson is a professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California and a research fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He was a senior economist with President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. Henderson edited the first, and still the only, reader-friendly economics encyclopedia, The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics. He is the author of The Joy of Freedom: An Economist's Odyssey. Charles L. Hooper is president and co-founder of Objective Insights, a consulting company that provides financial and marketing analysis for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. He is a visiting fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.