Decisive
How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
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4.3 • 8 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The four principles that can help us to overcome our brains' natural biases to make better, more informed decisions--in our lives, careers, families and organizations.
In Decisive, Chip Heath and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Made to Stick and Switch, tackle the thorny problem of how to overcome our natural biases and irrational thinking to make better decisions, about our work, lives, companies and careers.
When it comes to decision making, our brains are flawed instruments. But given that we are biologically hard-wired to act foolishly and behave irrationally at times, how can we do better? A number of recent bestsellers have identified how irrational our decision making can be. But being aware of a bias doesn't correct it, just as knowing that you are nearsighted doesn't help you to see better. In Decisive, the Heath brothers, drawing on extensive studies, stories and research, offer specific, practical tools that can help us to think more clearly about our options, and get out of our heads, to improve our decision making, at work and at home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
