ANATOMY OF DECISION MAKING, THE

THE ANATOMY OF DECISION MAKING Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls By Noel M. Tichy and Warren G. Bennis (Penguin Group, 392 pp. $26.95)

Judgment calls are often viewed as singular moments resulting from a leader's intuition. They're seen as snapshots in time, developed instantly.

But good judgment requires a framework, say Noel M. Tichy and Warren G. Bennis in Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls. Their well-crafted book describes how successful business leaders view decision making as a process that is developed incrementally.

"Good judgment is not one terrific 'aha' moment after another," they say.

They should know. Each is an influential business author who has spent decades teaching leadership and advising top CEOs, such as Jack Welch of GE and Howard Schultz of Starbucks. Now, collaborating for the first time, they present a practical structure for making tough calls when the stakes are high and the right path isn't obvious.

The book begins with a refreshing admission-the subject of judgment is too complex a phenomenon and too influenced by personal style and countless other variables to pin down definitively. So Tichy and Bennis focus on what they consider to be tangible: the components of great judgment calls, including how to recognize the critical moment before a decision must be made and how to execute one afterward.

Long-term success is the sole marker of good judgment, they say, and good leaders sort the important from the trivial.

"What really matters is not how many calls a leader gets right or even what percentage of calls a leader gets right," they wrote. "Rather, it is important how many of the important ones he or she gets right."

To illuminate their key concepts, Tichy and Bennis spotlight high-level executives, including A.G. Lafley of Procter & Gamble, Jeff Immelt of GE, Brad Anderson of Best Buy, and Jim McNerney of Boeing. The book's main chapters include exemplary stories and anecdotes from those leaders about how they prepared for, executed, and evaluated critical judgments. In each case, the reader sees a person discerning before deciding.

The authors cut through the subject's complexity by enumerating their important ideas. For example, readers learn that all key business decisions occupy one of three domains. The most important, the authors say, is making judgments about who is on your team (people calls). Other domains involve organizational direction (strategy calls) and problem solving (crisis calls).

Also, readers learn that good judgment is a three-part process. The first is preparation, which is all about framing the issue that will demand a judgment call and ensuring that team members understand why the decision is important. The second is arriving at the decision and explaining it. The third is carrying out the decision while learning and adjusting along the way. Examples from the book's sources show why each step matters, and how each offers "redo loops," or opportunities to correct missteps.

Perhaps the message that will resonate most with training and development professionals is that leaders must focus on creating a point of view called a "storyline" and align their team and stakeholders around it well in advance of the immediate need for judgment calls. This concept is best addressed in a chapter titled, "Judgment for Future Generations: The New York City Leadership Academy," which discusses how New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and School Chancellor Joel Klein transformed and revitalized the city's school system. Their decision-making process included "framing and naming" the issue (a leadership problem), crafting success benchmarks, and defining new personnel roles.

Another must-read section is the "Handbook for Leadership Judgment" that follows the last chapter. In it, Tichy and collaborator Chris DeRose provide a seven-part section, rife with charts and tables, that reads like an operations manual, enabling readers to apply what they've learned from the book.

Judgment could be shorter and not lose its effectiveness; and a chapter on character and courage could be nixed entirely. It also is geared a bit too heavily toward the C-level crowd-there are no examples of judgment provided by mid-level employees, but it's a smart, pragmatic look into the anatomy of a good judgment call.

Tichy and Bennis help us realize that good judgment isn't innate. It can be learned and refined, but first requires an ongoing process of increasing knowledge about one's self, social network, and organization.

"We need more leaders with better judgment," the authors say frankly in the book's conclusion. Reading this book can help you become one.

It deserves three cups of coffee.

Darin Painter is a freelance writer in Cleveland; darin@writingmatters.com.

Copyright American Society for Training and Development Feb 2008
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