Each of my Vistage Advancing Leader groups, as well as my SBM Mastermind group, is reading Decisive by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. It’s a great book on making better decisions. Here is my original book review on the book.
How many decisions do you make on any given day? Ten? Twenty? Probably many more. Big decisions. Small decisions. Decisions whether to make decisions. You are making difficult decisions all day. How do you make those decisions? Would you like to make better decisions?
Stop what you plan to read this summer and read Decisive, written by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The author’s last two books, Switch and Made to Stick, were both best-sellers. This book will be as well. Like their previous books, the Heath brothers gathered every bit of existing research on the topic, along with many interesting anecdotal examples, and then organized them into a compelling journal of best practices on making the best decision.
The Heaths describe in their book several reasons why we tend to make bad decisions, and they include:
- Overconfidence
- Emotions
- Laziness
- Over-analysis
To overcome these biases, the book provides the reader with a four-step process. Why a process? Research indicates that “process” mattered more than “analysis” by a factor of six. This is a simple but powerful process offered by the Heaths that I am eager to begin using myself.
Aside from the process, the book offered me a number of very good questions to ask when working through a decision. Here are a few of them:
- “What would my successor do?”
- “What are we giving up with this decision?”
- “What would have to be true for this option to be the right answer?”
- “What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?”
I loved this book and recommend it to any small business owner or leader.
You can purchase your copy of Decisive through this paid link.