TOP DRAWER BOOK REVIEW
by
HL Carpenter

 

Decide & Conquer
by Stephen P. Robbins
190 pages; hardcover; $19.95
Financial Times Prentice Hall, New Jersey, 2004

How good are you at making decisions?

Author Dr. Stephen Robbins, a faculty member at San Diego State University, has distilled gallons of behavioral research into a quick, punchy book in an effort to help you answer that question.

If you're a fan of short psychological quizzes that peg your personality to a score, you'll like the section on determining your decision making style. And Psych 101 enthusiasts will definitely recognize the biases other people bring to the decision making process. You might even identify a few of your own.

Fortunately, Dr. Robbins has also included insights into defeating these impediments and putting yourself on the road to better decision making.

According to him, the quality of your decisions depends in part on your biases, personality tendencies and bad habits. Despite those obstacles, you may make good decisions anyway - though not necessarily the right ones.

A good decision, as defined by Dr. Robbins, means you've used a rational decision making process to select the best option. That process is made up of learnable skills, which are the focus of Decide & Conquer. On the other hand, whether the decision is "right" is out of your control.

So what's your decision about reading Decide & Conquer?

Maybe you think you already make good decisions. Are you sure? You could be a victim of overconfidence. Planning to wait and make the decision tomorrow? That's the Inertia Bias rearing its ugly head. In fact, taking this much time to decide might mean you're frozen with "paralysis analysis." On the other hand, making no decision means you've made the decision to not decide, which can lead to the "inaction trap."

Go ahead. Make a choice. Or, as Dr. Robbins puts it, Decide & Conquer.

 

Review originally published July 2004.