A good book

Credit Union Management, May 2002 by Niemela, Cynder, Ochalla, Bryan

A GOOD BOOK

Title: Winning Decisions Author: Edward Russo and Paul J.H. Schoemaker Publisher: Doubleday ISBN: 0-385-50225-7

"Business revolves around making decisions, often risky decisions, usually with incomplete information and too often in less time than we need," write co-authors Edward Russo and Paul Schoemaker in Winning Decisions: Getting it Right the First Time.

Written by two seasoned business advisors and world leaders in behavioral business studies (not to mention writers who have worked with many of the world's most high-pressured executives), Winning Decisions attempts to help executives at every level take the risky steps and make the nerve-- wracking decisions needed to take a company or organization to the proverbial "next level."

Russo, professor of marketing and behavior science at Cornell University, and Schoemaker, research director at Wharton's Mack Center for Technology and Innovation as well as curriculum designer and principal faculty member of CUES' CEO Institute I (www.cues.org/education/ceoinst.htm), back up their promises with a new set of rules, ideas and strategies. According to the authors, if you want to take your business a step (or two) higher, you'll have to throw the old-fashioned ways of making decisions-relying on intuition, common sense and specialized expertise-out the window.

Instead, they favor worksheets, questionnaires, case studies and other straightforward techniques and anecdotes analyzing major decisions made by such organizations as British Airways, NASA, Shell Oil and Pepsi to teach executives what they predict will be a "new way of decision-making."

Russo and Schoemaker-whose services have been sought out by hundreds of companies over the years, including Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Unilever--contend that decision-making is a skill that must be developed and honed if it is to be used effectively. Some of the straightforward techniques covered in Winning Decisions include how to:

* reframe issues to ensure the real problem is being addressed,

* improve the quality and quantity of your options,

* convert expert, yet conflicting, opinions into useful insights, make diversity of views and conflict work to your advantage, foster efficient and effective group decision-making, and

* learn from past decisions-your own and those of others.

Order at www.cues.org/barnes.html.