Good management is about nothing if not good decision making. Unfortunately, decisiveness has been seen as a character trait like courage: there are those who can pull the trigger – the great executives – and those who can’t – the armies of wafflers who are terrified of being forced to accept the consequences of their actions.
A new wave of social scientists, however, is upending this view by digging into the psychological and social factors that influence our decisions. By developing better processes, they hope to make decision making less like voodoo and more like carpentry.
Chip Heath, a professor at Stanford’s business school, and his brother Dan Heath, a fellow at Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, have already written two excellent books of pop social science: Made to Stick and Switch . Their latest, Decisions: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work digs into the latest findings on decision making.