Readers approaching this book because they have a pressing decision may be annoyed by the Heaths’ lumbering pace, but for...
A manual on how to become more rational when facing difficult decisions at work and in your personal life.
The brothers Heath (Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, 2010, etc.) are a writing team with a couple of best-selling business titles under their belt. Chip, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Dan, a senior fellow at Duke’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, specialize in writing about how human behavior affects organizations. Their present collaboration examines a variety of decision-making processes in business and personal life—whom to hire, which job to take, which schools to apply to, whom to pursue a romantic relationship with—and argues that those processes matter more to the outcome than the decisions themselves. The Heaths argue that humans are hampered by four “enemies” of decision-making rooted in our unconscious behavior: narrow focus, confirmation bias, short-term emotion and overconfidence in the outcome. They propose a four-step model called WRAP (“Widen your options, Reality-test your assumptions, Attain distance before deciding, and Prepare to be wrong”) that they believe provides a template for good decision-making. All this is presented in the introductory chapter. The rest of the book fleshes out the Heaths’ thesis with dozens of examples of best practices—e.g., Sam Walton’s bus tour of competitors to decide how to speed customers through checkout lines; an Intel executive’s insight that enabled him to drop a safe product line and focus on a riskier one; a San Diego nonprofit’s struggle to decide to stick with their increasingly successful local mission or attempt a national one.
Readers approaching this book because they have a pressing decision may be annoyed by the Heaths’ lumbering pace, but for those who want to improve decision-making overall, the workshop style of the narrative should prove helpful.Pub Date: March 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-95639-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown Business
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An English journalist's judicious, albeit limited, take on the shape of things to come over the next generation. In evaluating what the future might hold, McRae, an associate editor of the British periodical Independent, all but ignores large areas of the Global Village, most notably the Middle East, to focus on North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. Before venturing any predictions, however, the author offers savvy status reports on the three economically consequential and committedly capitalist regions he has singled out for attention. McRae then assesses the forces that promise to change the developed world in the next 30 years or so. Cases in point range from demography (which tops his short list) through financial services, governance, natural resources, sociopolitical organization, technology, and trade. The accessible text (published last year in the UK) has helpful graphics and tabular material throughout. Getting down to business, the author provides plausibly detailed briefings on his trio of industrialized locales two decades into the next millennium. In McRae's informed opinion, for example, a vibrant US will have moved further down the road toward becoming a truly multicultural society, one whose living standards may depend on its capacity to reduce the costs of broken homes, crime, a decline in personal responsibility, and excessive litigiousness. By contrast, he suggest that the EU's economic ties could have come undone as a result of cultural diversity and issues of sovereignty. In the meantime, he concludes, an aging Japan could be hard put to keep pace with populous mainland China, whose economic potential is just now being realized. Whether or not McRae has 20/20 foresight, his short-run scenarios for free enterprise's showcase venues are both thought- provoking and credible. (Illustrations)
Pub Date: March 31, 1995
ISBN: 0-87584-604-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
Jungian analyst Hillman (coauthor, Freud's Own Cookbook, 1985, etc.) rambles on about a new, and hopefully healthier, paradigm of power for the business world. Hillman believes that business offers the closest thing our civilization has to a universal theology, and with that in mind he tries to destroy some old idols in the temple. In the first part of this book, he views two traditional notions of business health- -growth and efficiency—as limiting and even dangerous (Treblinka, he notes, resulted from the Nazis' push to kill with maximum efficiency). In contrast, he argues, the next century will need to stress service and maintenance, which place a premium on the personal dimension of life often devalued in the drive for growth and efficiency. Hillman then examines 20 different kinds of power, including prestige, exhibitionism, tyranny, concentration, authority, fearsomeness, purism, charisma, and subtle power. In the last section, he explores the power of myths on ideas, positing the existence of, and then characterizing, an armful of worldviews: the ``cyclical return'' of history; ``gloom and doom''; ``hopeful greening''; and ``apocalyptic catastrophe.'' Instead of dehumanizing control, he aims for ``maximizing through discretion, rather than direction.'' Well and good. The problem comes with his method of analysis, which is long on examining the etymology of words and the classical myths that illustrate forms of power, but is short on applying any of this to contemporary business. His tactic is ``to keep the ideas brief, quick, heated and scattered.'' The result is often psychobabble (``The intelligent exercise of power begins in the mind that has insight into the deeper structures of actions''). In his gnomic one-liners, Hillman comes across as part latter- day Emerson and part Sensitive New Age Guy, but the reader is likely to view the whole as flapdoodle.
Pub Date: April 20, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-46964-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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