Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions

Review:

Have you ever hired someone only to regret your decision two months later? Or looked at your financial portfolio and wondered why you bought the stocks you did? In Smart Choices, authors John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, and Howard Raiffa take the guesswork out of the decision-making process and offer a systematic approach to making the right choice. Most of us have problems making decisions, because we've never learned how. The authors write:

Despite the importance of decision making to our lives, few of us ever receive any training in it. So we are left to learn from experience. But experience is a costly, inefficient teacher that teaches us bad habits along with good ones. Because decision situations vary so markedly, the experience of making one important decision often seems of little use when facing the next.

Smart Choices outlines eight elements involved in making the right decision, from identifying exactly what the decision is and specifying your objectives to considering risk tolerance and looking at how what you decide on today influences what you may decide in the future. The book is full of real-life situations and scenarios that effectively illustrate each element of a good decision. If you think the topic of making the right choice is mundane or a simple matter of common sense, then think again. Smart Choices will relieve you of the regret that so many of us carry because we didn't know how to "think it through." --Harry C. Edwards

From the Inside Flap:

Where should I live? Which house should I buy?
* Is it time to change careers-or go back to graduate school?
* What mutual fund should I select to meet my financial goals?
* Which job candidate should I hire?
Making smart choices is a fundamental life skill, relevant to everyone: businesspeople, doctors, lawyers, teachers, students, parents, young, old. Your decisions shape the course of your professional career and the quality of your personal life. Yet few people learn real decision-making skills. Consequently we approach our choices tentatively, or even fearfully, and avoid giving decisions the time and thought required to turn them to our best advantage. Smart Choices offers the first straightforward, easy-to-follow process designed to improve the way you make business decisions, family decisions, personal decisions-any decision that can help you reach your goals.

Authors Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa, among the world's best-known experts on resolving complex decision problems, have created a user-friendly set of techniques for assessing your options more clearly and effectively, ultimately empowering you to make smarter choices. Their step-by-step procedures combine solid research with practical experience and common sense to help you specify your objectives, identify creative alternatives, make reasoned tradeoffs, clarify uncertainties, and evaluate the risks. Smart Choices doesn't tell you what to decide; it tells you how. As you routinely use the Smart Choices process, you'll become more confident in your ability to make good decisions and to explain them to others. More important, you'll make better decisions. Be proactive. Don't wait until a decision is forced on you-or made for you. Seek out decision opportunities that advance your long-range goals, values, and core beliefs. Take charge of your life by making Smart Choices a lifetime habit.

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