Smart Choices : A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions

John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney and Howard Raiffa

Retail Price: $35.00 LS Price: $24.50 You Save: $10.50 (30%) Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours. Format: Hardcover, 272pp. ISBN: 9780875848570 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: September 1998 Average Customer Review:

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Making smart choices is a fundamental life skill, relevant to anyone: managers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, students, parents, young, old. Your decisions will shape and influence the course of your professional career and the quality of your personal life--the ability to make good decisions is a key factor in determining whether you achieve your goals. To help you increase your chances of finding satisfying solutions, Smart Choices blends the art and science of decision making into a straightforward, proven approach for making tough choices. Smart Choices doesn't tell you what to decide; it tells you how. Authors Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa, among the world's best-known experts on resolving complex decision problems, blend the art and the science of decision making into accessible steps that lead you to consider your choices both intuitively and analytically. Here, for the first time, is a flexible system that can be applied to business decisions, to personal decisions, to family decisions--to any decision you make.

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.


Reviews

"The best book I know on how to make a decision."

—Roger Fisher, Coauthor of Getting to YES: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

"In Smart Choices, Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa tell us in plain language how to make optimal decisions in our everyday lives. They combine 100 collective years of experience in an exceptional resource that takes the reader step-by-step through problem formulation and final decision."

—Jerome P. Kassirer, Editor-in-Chief, New England Journal of Medicine

"This simplified guide to the decision-making process is a must read for anyone facing important real estate, personal, or professional decisions. Smart Choices gives you the tools to identify options you may never have considered."

—William E. Kiley, Jr., President, Hunneman and Co., Coldwell Banker

John S. Hammond is an internationally known decision-making consultant specializing in negotiation and corporate strategy, and a former professor at Harvard Business School. Ralph L. Keeney is a professor in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a well-known decision-making consultant. Howard Raiffa, a pioneer in developing decision and negotiating analysis, is professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, and the author of The Art and Science of Negotiation. He has extensively taught decision making to students of business, public policy, law, and medicine.

	Preface
1	Making Smart Choices	1
2	Problem	15
3	Objectives	31
4	Alternatives	47
5	Consequences	65
6	Tradeoffs	83
7	Uncertainty	109
8	Risk Tolerance	135
9	Linked Decisions	163
10	Psychological Traps	189
11	The Wise Decision Maker	217
	A Roadmap to Smart Choices	235
	About the Authors	243

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