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Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Life Decisions (Paperback)
by John Hammond, Ralph Keeney and Howard Raiffa
| Category:
Decision-making, Life skills, Self help, Self improvement |
| Market price: ¥ 168.00
MSL price:
¥ 158.00
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MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Good for making decisions in both personal and business setting, this rare good read is solid and practical in showing you how to make better life decisions. |
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Author: John Hammond, Ralph Keeney and Howard Raiffa
Publisher: Broadway; Reprint edition
Pub. in: March, 2002
ISBN: 0767908864
Pages: 256
Measurements: 7.6 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00513
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- MSL Picks -
"Despite the importance of decision making to our lives, few of us ever receive any training in it. So we are left to learn from experience. But experience is a costly, inefficient teacher that teaches us bad habits along with good ones. Because decision situations vary so markedly, the experience of making one important decision often seems of little use when facing the next.” – Authors of Smart Choices
Smart Choices offers the first straightforward, easy-to-follow process designed to improve the way you make business decisions, family decisions, personal decisions - any decision that can help you reach your goals. Authors Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa, among the world's best-known experts on resolving complex decision problems, have created a set of techniques for assessing your options more clearly and effectively, ultimately empowering you to make smarter choices. Their step-by-step procedures combine solid research with practical experience and common sense to help you specify your objectives, identify creative alternatives, make reasoned tradeoffs, clarify uncertainties, and evaluate the risks. Smart Choices doesn't tell you what to decide; it tells you how.
This book is extremely accessible, practical and useful. Most impressive was its holistic approach to decision-making, ranging from solid theory (clearly presented with realistic examples you can relate to), through practical tips (like "remember that your decision cannot be better than your best alternative") to a well-presented chapter on psychological traps to which people often fall victim. You will recognize many of these from your experience at work. This book is good for decision making situations in both life and business setting.
A high recommendation to all. It’s a good gift to new graduates and young working professionals.
Target readers:
General readers
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John Hammond, Ph.D., is a renowned management consultant and a former professor at both Harvard and MIT. Also the coauthor of Strategic Market Planning, he lives in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Ralph Keeney, Ph.D., is the author of Value-Focused Thinking and runs a consulting practice in San Francisco, where he lives. He is also a professor at the University of Southern California. Howard Raiffa, Ph.D., now professor emeritus , has taught the art and science of decision making and negotiations in the Schools of Business, Public Policy, Law, and Medicine at Harvard University for almost five decades. He is widely recognized as one of the founders of the field of decision sciences. He lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.
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From the Publisher:
Where should I live?
Is it time to switch careers?
What is the best course of action for me?
Decisions shape our experiences, from choosing which job offer to accept, to buying the right car, to selecting a good accountant. How do we know which choice is the smart one? How can we be consistent and confident in our decisions? In this book from the three leading authorities on decision- making, readers learn how to approach all types of decisions with a simple set of skills developed by professors from Harvard, MIT, and the University of Southern California.
Combining solid research with common sense and practical experience, this user-friendly guide shows readers how to assess deep-seated objectives, create a comprehensive set of alternatives, determine likely consequences, make tradeoffs, and grapple with uncertainty. Not only will readers learn how to make decisions, they will learn how to make the smartest decisions. For anyone caught at a confusing crossroad – whether you’re choosing between mutual funds or deciding where to retire – the Smart Choices program will improve your decision-making abilities immediately, and make your life more rewarding and fulfilling.
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Chapter 1: Making Smart Choices
Our decisions shape our lives. Made consciously or unconsciously, with good or bad consequences, they represent the fundamental tool we use in facing the opportunities, the challenges, and the uncertainties of life.
• Should I go to college? If so, where? To study what?
• What career should I pursue? What job should I take?
• Should I get married now, or wait? Should I have children? If so, when and how many?
• Where should I live? Should I trade up to a larger house? What can I contribute to my community?
• Which job candidate should I hire? What marketing strategies should I recommend for my company?
• Since I feel unfulfilled, should I change jobs? Go back to school? Move?
• How should I invest my savings? When should I retire? To do what? Where?
Such questions mark the progress of our lives and our careers, and the way we answer them determines, to a large extent, our place in society and in the world. Our success in all the roles we play - student, worker, boss, citizen, spouse, parent, individual - turns on the decisions we make.
Making Decisions is a Fundamental Life Skill
Some Decisions will be fairly obvious - "no-brainers." Your bank account is low, but you have a two-week vacation coming up and you want to get away to someplace warm to relax with your family. Will you accept your in-laws' offer of free use of their Florida beachfront condo? Sure. You like your employer and feel ready to move forward in your careers. Will you step in for your boss for three weeks while she attends a professional development course? Of course.
But the no-brainers are the exceptions. Most of the important decisions you'll face in life are tough and complex, with no easy or obvious solutions. And they probably won't affect you alone. They'll affect your family, your friends, your coworkers and many others known and unknown. Making good decisions is thus one of the most important determinants of how well you meet your responsibilities and achieve your personal and professional goals. In short, the ability to make smart choices is a fundamental life skill.
Most of us, however, dread making hard decisions. By definition, tough choices have high stakes and serious consequences; they involve numerous and complex considerations; and they expose us to the judgments of others. The need to make a difficult decision puts us at risk of anxiety, confusion, doubt, error, regret, embarrassment, loss. No wonder we find it har to settle down and choose. In living through a major decision, we suffer periods of alternating self-doubt and over- confidence, of procrastination, of wheel-spinning and flip-flopping, of frustration, even of desperation. Our discomfort often leads us to make decisions too quickly, or too slowly, or too arbitrarily. We flip a coin, toss a dart, let someone else - or time - decide. The result: a mediocre choice, dependent on luck for success. It's only afterwards that we realize we could have made a smarter choice. And by then it's too late.
You Can Learn to Make Better Decisions
Why do we have such trouble? It's simple: we don't know how to make decisions well. Despite the importance of decision making to our lives, few of us ever receive any training in it. So we are left to learn from experience. But experience is a costly, inefficient teacher that teaches us bad habits along with good ones. Because decision situations vary so markedly, the experience of making one important decision often seems of little use when facing the next. How is deciding what job to take or what house to buy similar to deciding what school to send your children to, what medical treatment to pursue for a serious illness, or what balance to strike among cost, aesthetics, and function in planning a new office park?
The connection among the decisions you make lies not in what you're deciding, but in how you decide. The only way to really raise your odds of making a good decision is to learn to use a good decision-making process - one that gets you to the best solution with a minimal loss of time, energy, money, and composure.
An effective decision-making process fulfills these six criteria:
• It focuses on what's important.
• It is logical and consistent.
• It acknowledges both subjective and objective factors and blends analytical with intuitive thinking.
• It requires only as much information and analysis as is necessary to resolve a particular dilemma.
• It encourages and guides the gathering of relevant information and informed opinion.
• It is straightforward, reliable, easy to use, and flexible.
A decision-making approach that addresses these criteria can be practiced on decisions major and minor - what movie to see, what car to buy, what vacation to take, what investment to make, what department head to hire, what medical treatment to pursue. And the more you use such an approach, the more efficient and effective it will become. As you grow more skilled and your confidence grows, making decisions will become second nature to you. In fact, you may find your friends and associates asking you for help and advice with their tough choices!
Use the PrOACT Approach to Make Smart Choices
This book provides you with a straightforward, proven approach for making decisions. It does not tell you what to decide, but it does show you how. Our approach meets the six criteria listed above. It helps you to see both the tangible and the intangible aspects of your decision situation more clearly and to translate all pertinent facts, feelings, opinions, beliefs, and advice into the best possible choice. Highly flexible, it is applicable to business and professional decisions, to personal decisions, to family decisions - any decision you need to make.
One thing the method won't do is make hard decisions easy. That's impossible. Hard decisions are hard because they're complex, and no one can make that complexity disappear. But you can manage complexity sensibly. How? Just like you'd climb up a mountain: one step at a time.
Our approach takes one step at a time. We have found that even the most complex decision can be analyzed and resolved by considering a set of eight elements. The first five - Problem, Objective, Alternatives, Consequences, Tradeoffs - constitute the core of our approach and are applicable to virtually any decision. The acronym for these – PrOACT - serves as a reminder that the best approach to decision situations is a proactive one. The worst thing you can do is wait until a decision is forced on you - or made for you.
The Eight Elements of Smart Choices
Problem
Objectives
Alternatives
Consequences
Tradeoffs
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Uncertainty
Risk Tolerance
Linked Decisions
The three remaining elements - uncertainty, risk tolerance, and linked decisions - help clarify decisions in volatile or evolving environments. Some decisions won't involve these elements, but many of your most important decisions will.
The essence of the PrOACT approach is to divide and conquer. To resolve a complex decision situation, you break it into these elements and think systematically about each one, focusing on those that are key to your particular situation. Then you reassemble your thoughts and analysis into the smart choice. So, although our method may not make a hard decision easy, it will certainly make it easier.
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| View all 12 comments |
Jerome (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
"In Smart Choices, John Hammond, Ralph Keeney, and Howard Raiffa tell us in plain language how to make optimal decisions in our everyday lives. They combine one hundred collective years of experience in an exceptional resource that takes the reader step-by-step through problem formulation and final decision. |
Stephen (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
Throughout Smart Choices, Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa provide valuable insight and guidance on the inevitable and ongoing negotiation with yourself when facing a difficult decision. By following their effective, systematic process, anyone can make important personal or business decisions with greater clarity, confidence, and efficiency. |
Yeager (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
The authors of the book Smart Choices (Hammond, Keeney and Raiffa) look at decision making as a disciplined informational affair. If you gather information according to their template you will make better decisions about some things. But they give only passing mention to the fact that decision-making is largely a psychological affair. Information handling (the topic of the decision) is opposed by psychological (emotional) determinants of decision-making. In the gap between these two factors, most people are driven more by emotions than by "rational factors" about information.
The motivation in decision-making is about what people want. The choices made are the expressions of motives - and motives are, by definition, psychological machinery. Psychological machinery is emotional. Period. If you consider the logic of TV's CSI show or Lieutenant Columbo, for example, any behavior depends on three things: motive, means and opportunity. The authors of this book have concentrated on the means for making a good decision. Opportunity to make a decision is taken for granted. But they have deleted the systematic emotional bias that disables so many motives of so many people so much of the time.
The downside of this excellent book is that the authors use the outline of their book in a way similar to the way pilots use a preflight checklist - to insure they will operate the machinery of their aircraft properly. Few human and interpersonal situations respond to "checklist logic". People are not normally as well organized as a well-maintained aircraft. People reach closure on decisions with emotional logic independent of the literal facts - in more cases than not. People have strong emotional habits and those emotions dictate the choices, not the information. That is, emotions frame the overall decision-making stage which relegates "rational" checklists to bit players in the story of the decision process. Relatively few individuals are able to shift the balance toward the rational end of the gap and away from emotional dominance. Emotional tune-ups, done by a trained professional, do more to improve decisions than any rational checklist possibly can.
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David (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-11 00:00>
Making decisions is a fundamental life skill. Most of us dread making hard decisions. In real life tough choices almost always involve high stakes and serious consequences, they may involve numerous and multiple complex considerations, and they expose us to the judgment of others. The need to make a difficult decision put us at risk of anxiety, confusion, doubt, regret, embarrassment, loss, you name it.
In this book the authors explain in a practical, and easy to follow language, decision-analysis techniques and stratagems for the benefit of the rest of us. They provide substantial, straightforward explanations of fundamental concepts (risk tolerance, sunk costs, desirability curves, etc.).
In the step-by-step procedures they combine expertise, solid investigation, practical experience, and common sense, to help the reader understand what they want to accomplish, identify creative choices, evaluate risks, clarify any existing doubt, and establish reasonable transactions. This book won't tell you what to do, but how to do it.
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View all 12 comments |
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