Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions

by Howard Raiffa, John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney

Book Overview

Making smart choices is a fundamental life skill, relevant to anyone: managers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, students, parents, young, old. Your decisions will shape and influence the course of your professional career and the quality of your personal life--the ability to make good decisions is a key factor in determining whether you achieve your goals. To help you increase your chances of finding satisfying solutions, Smart Choices blends the art...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0875848575
• ISBN13: 9780875848570
• Release Date: September 1998
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

A useful guide for systematic decision-making

This is an excellent book. The title may make this appear to be one of the too-numerous mass-market books which claim to offer advice on business and personal decision-making but actually offer lots of specific admonitions which are based on values which the reader may not share (example: anything by Steven Covey). This book, however, doesn't try to sell you any of the the authors' values; instead it teaches you an effective process that you can use to analyze any decision-making situation and make the choices which are most effective for achieving your objectives, whatever they may be. The book treats the subject in the same systematic way that it might be treated in an academic decision theory text, only it is written in plain language which can be read quickly and easily comprehended by the general reader. It finishes with a summary outline (they call it a "roadmap") which is a useful quick reference.

Highly recommend this book for executives

As an executive I am faced with making key decisions almost every day. In many complex decisions there is almost always conflict between logical analysis vs. intuitive processing while there is a shortage of perfect information and time. Smart Decisions lays out a simple, clear and practical framework and process for decision making. Although many of the concepts are not novel, the power is that the book links various tools and technigues as discrete decision making steps. Each step builds on the next. They greatly enhance the concepts through many practical examples for making business and personal decisions. I highly recommend this book!