Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Overview

Chip and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick, tackle one of the most critical topics in our work and personal lives: how to make better decisions.
　
   Research in psychology has revealed that our decisions are disrupted by an array of biases and irrationalities: We’re overconfident. We seek out information that supports us and downplay information that doesn’t. We get distracted by short-term emotions. When it comes to making choices, it seems, our brains are flawed instruments. Unfortunately, merely being aware of these shortcomings doesn’t fix the problem, any more than knowing that we are nearsighted helps us to see. The real question is: How can we do better?

   In Decisive, the Heaths, based on an exhaustive study of the decision-making literature, introduce a four-step process designed to counteract these biases. Written in an engaging and compulsively readable style, Decisive takes readers on an unforgettable journey, from a rock star’s ingenious decision-making trick to a CEO’s disastrous acquisition, to a single question that can often resolve thorny personal decisions.

   Along the way, we learn the answers to critical questions like these: How can we stop the cycle of agonizing over our decisions? How can we make group decisions without destructive politics? And how can we ensure that we don’t overlook precious opportunities to change our course?　

   Decisive is the Heath brothers’ most powerful—and important—book yet, offering fresh strategies and practical tools enabling us to make better choices. Because the right decision, at the right moment, can make all the difference.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307956392
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/26/2013
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	157,440
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

CHIP HEATH is a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He lives in Los Gatos, California. DAN HEATH is a senior fellow at Duke University's Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE). He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. The Heath brothers are the bestselling authors of Made to Stick and Switch.

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Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 The Four Villains of Decision Making 9

Widen Your Options

2 Avoid a Narrow Frame 32

3 Multitrack 50

4 Find Someone Who's Solved Your Problem 68

Reality-Test Your Assumptions

5 Consider the Opposite 92

6 Zoom Out, Zoom In 115

7 Ooch 135

Attain Distance Before Deciding

8 Overcome Short-Term Emotion 156

9 Honor Your Core Priorities 175

Prepare to be Wrong

10 Bookend the Future 194

11 Set a Tripwire 218

12 Trusting the Process 239

Next Steps 254

Recommendations for Further Reading 255

Clinics 257

Overcoming Obstacles 267

Endnotes 273

Acknowledgments 301

Index 303

Editorial Reviews

The Heath brothers, a Stanford University Graduate School of Business professor and a senior fellow at Duke University's Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship respectively and coauthors of Switch and Made to Stick, tackle the problems of decision-making, and all the failures that come with it. To help with the decision making process, the authors approached it from four principles that they refer to as the "WRAP model": Widen your options; Reality test your assumptions; Attain distance before deciding; and Prepare to be wrong. Each principle is given several chapters, with examples provided for putting these approaches into practice. Breaking out of a narrow framework to recognize other options, for example, is approached through methods such as considering opportunity costs and the vanishing options test. The writing is humorous and often surprising, a tool that the authors use to great effect when sharing such examples as David Lee Roth's obsession with brown M&Ms. Coupled with their insightful analyses, the book proves particularly insightful.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

A leader's most important job is to make good decisions, which—minus perfect knowledge of the future—is tough to do consistently…The Heath brothers explain how to navigate the land mines laid by our irrational brains and improve our chances of good outcomes.” -Inc.

From the Publisher

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.

Kirkus Reviews