Decision Management: How to Assure Better Decisions in Your Company

by J. Frank Yates

Book Overview

Why do the people in some companies continually dazzle us with their brilliant decisions while those in others make one blunder after another? Do they understand their businesses better? Are they just plain smarter? Or is it all a matter of luck? The answer, says J. Frank Yates, is none of the above. The real key, rarely recognized, is how the leaders manage the company's decision processes--the leaders' decision management practices. Drawing on his...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0787956260
• ISBN13: 9780787956264
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Yates applies impeccable reason to a vital management subject.

The art of making good rather than poor Decisions is the single main difference between a top organisation and a weak one; or a top manager and a poor one - yet business literature really has few excellent books that focus on how to ensure high quality decisions are consistently made in an organisation. Instead the typical management bookshelf may be populated with the Jack Welch type volumes where charisma and gut instinct are turned into heroic virtues. Well, in an age where Gladwell's Blink is a best seller and the incredible capacity of humans to make quick judgments is being celebrated, lets not forget that gut instinct can lead to terrible mistakes also. In an organisation these can be devastating. Both Yates and writers such as Scott Plous (author of the wonderful Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making) point out a raft of human errors where our gut can lead us into terrible choices. J Frank Yates has worked and consulted at high levels in the USA, Beijing, Netherlands and Japan, and from his experience he has broken down decision-making into a hierarchy of 10 quite sensible questions that act as a checklist for managers. The list begins with the simple fundamental: Why are we deciding anything at all? and then asks: Who, or what, will make this decision - and how will they approach this task. The volume then drills into the various skills required to consider the options, trade-offs, and possibilities that might arise from a decision: those "unforseen consequences" that seem all too often to surprise decision makers. Yates peppers the book with good actual case histories (both good and bad outcomes are portrayed) and takes the time to consider how a better decision-making culture can be created in organisations. I don't agree with all of Yates findings and recommendations - but that may be a product of my more emotive personality traits (Yates strikes me as an absolutely rational type) but this volume has proved extremely useful in providing a foundation in "decision thinking" relevant to my work in research where a key challenge is to bump research findings into the court of organisational decision-making. By considering Yates' well explained checklist we can ask more appropriate questions and help clients make more confident decisions. That's why I rate this volume highly.

A Must Read For Practising Managers

The book is based on the premise that the performance (good or bad) of a Company is largely dependent on how (well or poorly) the people within the Company decide. Therefore, this book deals with the process of improving the manner in which people in the Company make decisions. This book is about how to assure better decisions.Essentially, Decision Management includes all aspects that a Manager needs to take into account to improve the quality of a Company's decision. Decision Management involves four tasks or responsibilities viz, influencing specific decisions, supervising decision routines, shaping decision procedures and providing decision resources.The four key drivers to ensure good Decision Management are to recognize Decision Management as a core managerial responsibility, have a proper understanding or appreciation of decision problems and processes, understand how people in the Company decide, and finally, to learn from decision-making principles that have emerged from research and practical experience.Every decision problem poses ten fundamental or cardinal decision issues (this is the major theme of this book and 5 full Chapters, out of 9, have been devoted to this ) These are:„« Need„« Mode„« Investment„« Options„« Possibilities„« Judgement„« Value„« Tradeoffs„« Acceptability„« ImplementationThis checklist is useful to carry around when one is evaluating or going through a decision making process to ensure that no issue is overlooked.Overall a very practical book with lots of examples to convey the underlying issues. Practicing Managers, in particular, would find it quite useful.