Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

From Barnes & Noble

Pundits advise us to make decisions by following our heart or instinct, but is such irrational behavior this really wise? Co-authors Chip and Dan Heath (Made to Stick; Switch) don't think so. The Stanford professor and Duke University senior fellow maintain that our brains often lead us in the wrong direction—and they can prove the point by citing ample scientific research. To neutralize these dangerous impulses, their new book provides four principles that can set us on the path to make more informed, successful decisions in every arena of our lives.

Publishers Weekly

The Heath brothers, a Stanford University Graduate School of Business professor and a senior fellow at Duke University's Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship respectively and coauthors of Switch and Made to Stick, tackle the problems of decision-making, and all the failures that come with it. To help with the decision making process, the authors approached it from four principles that they refer to as the "WRAP model": Widen your options; Reality test your assumptions; Attain distance before deciding; and Prepare to be wrong. Each principle is given several chapters, with examples provided for putting these approaches into practice. Breaking out of a narrow framework to recognize other options, for example, is approached through methods such as considering opportunity costs and the vanishing options test. The writing is humorous and often surprising, a tool that the authors use to great effect when sharing such examples as David Lee Roth's obsession with brown M&Ms. Coupled with their insightful analyses, the book proves particularly insightful.
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Kirkus Reviews

A manual on how to become more rational when facing difficult decisions at work and in your personal life. The brothers Heath (Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, 2010, etc.) are a writing team with a couple of best-selling business titles under their belt. Chip, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Dan, a senior fellow at Duke's Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, specialize in writing about how human behavior affects organizations. Their present collaboration examines a variety of decision-making processes in business and personal life--whom to hire, which job to take, which schools to apply to, whom to pursue a romantic relationship with--and argues that those processes matter more to the outcome than the decisions themselves. The Heaths argue that humans are hampered by four "enemies" of decision-making rooted in our unconscious behavior: narrow focus, confirmation bias, short-term emotion and overconfidence in the outcome. They propose a four-step model called WRAP ("Widen your options, Reality-test your assumptions, Attain distance before deciding, and Prepare to be wrong") that they believe provides a template for good decision-making. All this is presented in the introductory chapter. The rest of the book fleshes out the Heaths' thesis with dozens of examples of best practices--e.g., Sam Walton's bus tour of competitors to decide how to speed customers through checkout lines; an Intel executive's insight that enabled him to drop a safe product line and focus on a riskier one; a San Diego nonprofit's struggle to decide to stick with their increasingly successful local mission or attempt a national one. Readers approaching this book because they have a pressing decision may be annoyed by the Heaths' lumbering pace, but for those who want to improve decision-making overall, the workshop style of the narrative should prove helpful.

From the Publisher

“A leader's most important job is to make good decisions, which—minus perfect knowledge of the future—is tough to do consistently…The Heath brothers explain how to navigate the land mines laid by our irrational brains and improve our chances of good outcomes.”-Inc.