Good decisions can be made at warp speed -- if you know how to bypass biases and embrace the opportunity that pressure offers -- say a Cornell business school professor and a Wharton consultant in a new book.
Described by Harvard Business Review as a "comprehensive, well-balanced guide" to decision making, the book Winning Decisions (Doubleday Currency, 2002) by Professors J. Edward Russo and Paul Schoemaker takes decades of groundbreaking research on how people make decisions and delivers a four-step framework for making good decisions quickly.
Russo is a professor of marketing and behavioral science at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management. Schoemaker is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and research director of its Mack Center for Managing Technological Innovation. An earlier book by the authors, Decision Traps, studied how such occurrences as the Challenger space shuttle disaster might have been avoided through better decision making.
In their new book, the authors write: "The terrain for today's decision maker is a mineeld in which any misstep can provoke a devastating explosion." Today, the old-fashioned ways of making decisions -- intuition, common sense and specialized expertise -- are no longer sufficient, they note.
Russo and Schoemaker, who have consulted with executives, managers and other professionals in a host of Fortune 500 companies for 30 years, offer this four-step decision-making framework: 1) frame the issues to ensure the real problem is being solved; 2) gather all facts and options plus reasonable evaluations of the unknowables; 3) use a systematic approach, rather than an intuitive one; and 4) refine your decision using lessons learned from past successes and failures. The authors also analyze major decisions made by such organizations as British Airways, NASA, Shell Oil and PepsiCo and include worksheets, tools and questionnaires.
To develop their framework, Russo and Schoemaker applied the research of top behavioral scientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who studied how people make decisions. Originally published only in academic journals, the findings are now accessible to all in Winning Decisions
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