Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep it from Happening to You

Citation

Murphy, A. (2010), "Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep it from Happening to You", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 31 No. 1, pp. 94-95. https://doi.org/10.1108/01437731011010434

This book is very timely and indeed a little scary! Readers over the age of 50 – in Europe and the US at least – are likely to have a lived awareness of most of the bad meta political and monetary decisions discussed in the book and may be more than a little cross that bad decisions have caused us all so much economic pain in recent years. The four types of safeguards promoted in the book are, alas, too‐late for many of us!

So, about the book itself. The content is divided into 11 chapters in three parts. The parts are: “How your brain makes decisions”; “Why decisions go wrong”; “Red flags and safeguards”. The appendices contain a database of cases and a database of safeguards. There are extensive chapter notes after the appendices and brief information about the authors.

The book design is pleasingly simple, with large font and a few simple figures to illustrate complex concepts and schemas. The language is clear and unpretentious, making the book very accessible, and indeed enjoyable, for any readership. The clarity of the language perhaps reflects the main arguments of the book, that there are generally a small number of key reasons why we make bad decisions in our personal, professional, and political lives: emotional rather than rational attachment to particular ways of doing things; misinterpreting past experiences; using flawed pre‐judgements; making flawed analogies; being over‐confident in our opinions; putting self‐interest before the greater good. Sounds simple, but how complex in reality!

The safeguards against bad decisions recommended in the book focus on four categories: experience, data, and analysis; group debate and challenge; governance; monitoring. These are probably of more use to companies and organizations than to the individual reader, but there is such basic common sense in the elaborated checklists it is surprising that experienced leaders do actually make such bad decisions amid so many layers of wisdom and advice!

This book is a very stimulating read on any level and one which could be usefully kept on the shelf of management literature when a reality check is required! I enjoyed reading it and also enjoyed discussing it with colleagues: a good recommendation for any management manual.