Robbins - Decide & conquer: the ultimate guide for improving your decision making

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The Ultimate Guide for Improving
Your Decision Making

Second Edition

Stephen P. Robbins, Ph.D.

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

First Printing October 2014

ISBN-10: 0-13-396673-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-13-396673-2

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014947300

For Frenchy.
Everyday Im reminded that asking you to marry me
remains one of the best decisions I ever made.

Stephen P. Robbins (Ph.D., University of Arizona) is professor emeritus of management at San Diego State University and the worlds best-selling textbook author in the areas of both management and organizational behavior. His books have sold more than 6 million copies and have been translated into 20 languages. His books are currently used at more than 1,500 U.S. colleges and universities, as well as hundreds of schools throughout Canada, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.

In Dr. Robbins other life, he participates in masters track competitions. Since turning 50 in 1993, he has set numerous indoor and outdoor age-group world sprint records. He has won two dozen indoor and outdoor U.S. championships at 60m, 100m, 200m, and 400m, and 14 individual gold medals at World Masters Track Championships. In 2005, Dr. Robbins was elected into the USA Masters Track & Field Hall of Fame.

Few issues affect our daily lives as does the quality of our decisions. How much you earn, your health status, your relationships, and your overall level of happiness are just a sampling of outcomes largely due to decisions youve made.

In spite of the importance of making good decisions, few of us have any formal training in the process. You couldnt graduate from high school without classes in English, math, science, government, and history. But did you have any courses in decision making? Probably not. If you want to be good at cooking, you take courses in cooking. The same is true for drawing, doing financial analysis, or healing the sick. But for some reason its just assumed that through practice and experience all of us can learn to be good decision makers.

A little observation tells us rather quickly that everyone doesnt make good decisions. Apparently, practice and experience arent very good teachers of this skill. I continue to be amazed at the bad decisions some people make. They buy stocks at their peak prices and sell them when theyre near their lows. They play slot machines and bet on other games of chance as if there is such a thing as a hot streak. They drive to a distant destination rather than fly for fear of dying in an airplane crash, even though flying is far safer.

We know a great deal about how people make decisions and how to improve the process. Sadly, this knowledge lies in thousands of research studies, and attempts to aggregate that knowledge have typically resulted in long-winded and overly technical books. It was because of this that I wrote the first edition of Decide & Conquer. I wrote it as an everymans guide on how to improve the choices that shape our lives. Drawing on those thousands of research studies, I translated what experts know about behavioral decision processes into layman terms with heavy emphasis on application. In this second edition, I updated the research findings and examples, as well as added several new chapters. The result continues to be a short, concise, easy-to-read bookhowever now with the latest findingsthat gives you the tools to make better decisions.

Keep in mind that giving you the tools to make better decisions is not the same as helping you to make the right decisions. This book is designed to show you the right way to structure and analyze problems. It focuses on the process you use to arrive at your decisions. Thats because a good decision should be judged by the process used, not the results achieved. In some cases, a good decision results in an undesirable outcome. If you used the right process, however, you will have made a good decision regardless of the outcome. So I cant tell you what to decide, but I can show you how to decide. Unfortunately, because chance events influence outcomes, there can be no assurances that using the right process will result in a desirable outcome. But it does increase the probability.

This book has been organized into five parts. , is a one-chapter brief summary of what you should get out of reading this book.

A book like this owes its existence to two distinct sets of contributors. First are those scholars who have studied the psychology of human judgment and decision making and have shared their research with us. The insights youll find in this book are the culmination of decades of research by hundreds of scholars such as Herbert Simon, Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Baruch Fischhoff, Paul Slovic, and Richard Thaler. My role here is similar to that played by television news anchors. TV news anchors dont make the news; they just report it. Similarly, I didnt make the findings you read about in this book; I merely report them. My contribution was to review the thousands of studies that have been done on behavioral decision making and translate them into a form that can be easily understood and used.