Hard Decisions

What do you do when the algorithm doesn’t have the answer? Countless tools and frameworks claim to make decisions objective and bias-free. But in reality, the defining decisions that leaders face are complex ones with subjective information sources and conflicting courses of action. That’s why the toughest choices are left to the leaders, and that’s why formulas won’t answer them. In Difficult Decisions: How Leaders Make the Right Call with Insight, Integrity, and Empathy, leadership expert and CEO of YSC Consulting, Eric Pliner, delivers a set of practical tools for readers to make sense of these complex, subjective decisions quickly and with integrity. It presents a path to understanding your own subjectivity, and how your morals, ethics, and responsibilities affect how leaders make the most important decisions. Difficult Decisions is ideal for executives, managers, and business leaders to examine their own intuition and navigate the most conflicted choices they make. It’s a challenging read and an indispensable resource to help readers develop self-reflection, clarify their values, and ultimately make the choice that is most “right” to them.

William and Zera were childhood sweethearts who got married after high school. That’s where the joy in their lives ended! William was off to fight in Vietnam, in service to his country that asked thousands of young men to give up their lifestyles to become soldiers. Like so many other families, William and Zera’s lives were uprooted and changed forever. Torn apart by the war, they tried to hold on as best they could. When news came to Zera of William’s death, nothing could repair the pain she felt. Time seems to heal all wounds and soon Zera met Steve. Although she felt uneasy about it, Zera began dating Steve and they were married. Many years passed before Zera got the shock of her life. One day, there was a phone call, then a visit. When Zera opened her door, of course who should be standing there but William! Zera couldn’t believe it. Neither could Zera’s current husband, Steve, who actually served with William in the war. Zera was forced to make “a hard decision.” Who to continue her life with? Could you make such a choice? So, who does Zera choose? And what shocking conclusion does the author keep hidden until the very end? The book is a tribute to the spirit and strength of every human being and what makes people do the things they do. There is something with which every reader will be able to identify. The book combines love, war, loss, family, friendship, death and all of the elements of daily life that anyone could humanly experience.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s inside account of the crises, choices, and challenges she faced during her four years as America’s 67th Secretary of State, and how those experiences drive her view of the future. “All of us face hard choices in our lives,” Hillary Rodham Clinton writes at the start of this personal chronicle of years at the center of world events. “Life is about making such choices. Our choices and how we handle them shape the people we become.” In the aftermath of her 2008 presidential run, she expected to return to representing New York in the United States Senate. To her surprise, her former rival for the Democratic Party nomination, newly elected President Barack Obama, asked her to serve in his administration as Secretary of State. This memoir is the story of the four extraordinary and historic years that followed, and the hard choices that she and her colleagues confronted. Secretary Clinton and President Obama had to decide how to repair fractured alliances, wind down two wars, and address a global financial crisis. They faced a rising competitor in China, growing threats from Iran and North Korea, and revolutions across the Middle East. Along the way, they grappled with some of the toughest dilemmas of US foreign policy, especially the decision to send Americans into harm’s way, from Afghanistan to Libya to the hunt for Osama bin Laden. By the end of her tenure, Secretary Clinton had visited 112 countries, traveled nearly one million miles, and gained a truly global perspective on many of the major trends reshaping the landscape of the twenty-first century, from economic inequality to climate change to revolutions in energy, communications, and health. Drawing on conversations with numerous leaders and experts, Secretary Clinton offers her views on what it will take for the United States to compete and thrive in an interdependent world. She makes a passionate case for human rights and the full participation in society of women, youth, and LGBT people. An astute eyewitness to decades of social change, she distinguishes the trendlines from the headlines and describes the progress occurring throughout the world, day after day. Secretary Clinton’s descriptions of diplomatic conversations at the highest levels offer readers a master class in international relations, as does her analysis of how we can best use “smart power” to deliver security and prosperity in a rapidly changing world—one in which America remains the indispensable nation.

MAKING HARD DECISIONS WITH DECISIONTOOLS® is a special version of Bob Clemen's best-selling text, MAKING HARD DECISIONS. This straight-forward book teaches the fundamental ideas of decision analysis, without an overly technical explanation of the mathematics used in management science. This new version incorporates and implements the powerful DecisionTools® by Palisade Corporation, the world's leading toolkit for risk and decision analysis. At the end of each chapter, topics are illustrated with step-by-step instructions for DecisionTools®. This new version makes the text more useful and relevant to students to business and engineering.

Whether we're buying a pair of jeans, ordering a cup of coffee, selecting a long-distance carrier, applying to college, choosing a doctor, or setting up a 401(k), everyday decisions—both big and small—have become increasingly complex due to the overwhelming abundance of choice with which we are presented. As Americans, we assume that more choice means better options and greater satisfaction. But beware of excessive choice: choice overload can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them, it can set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures. In the long run, this can lead to decision-making paralysis, anxiety, and perpetual stress. And, in a culture that tells us that there is no excuse for falling short of perfection when your options are limitless, too much choice can lead to clinical depression. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explains at what point choice—the hallmark of individual freedom and self-determination that we so cherish—becomes detrimental to our psychological and emotional well-being. In accessible, engaging, and anecdotal prose, Schwartz shows how the dramatic explosion in choice—from the mundane to the profound challenges of balancing career, family, and individual needs—has paradoxically become a problem instead of a solution. Schwartz also shows how our obsession with choice encourages us to seek that which makes us feel worse. By synthesizing current research in the social sciences, Schwartz makes the counter intuitive case that eliminating choices can greatly reduce the stress, anxiety, and busyness of our lives. He offers eleven practical steps on how to limit choices to a manageable number, have the discipline to focus on those that are important and ignore the rest, and ultimately derive greater satisfaction from the choices you have to make.

How to Resolve the Really Hard Problems Every manager makes tough calls—it comes with the job. And the hardest decisions are the “gray areas”—situations where you and your team have worked hard to find an answer, you’ve done the best analysis you can, and you still don’t know what to do. But you have to make a decision. You have to choose, commit, act, and live with the consequences and persuade others to follow your lead. Gray areas test your skills as a manager, your judgment, and even your humanity. How do you get these decisions right? In Managing in the Gray, Joseph Badaracco offers a powerful, practical, and even radical way to resolve these problems. Picking up where conventional tools of analysis leave off, this book provides tools for judgment in the form of five revealing questions. Asking yourself these five questions provides a simple yet profound way to broaden your thinking, sharpen your judgment, and develop a fresh perspective. What makes these questions so valuable is that they have truly stood the test of time—they’ve guided countless men and women, across many centuries and cultures, to resolve the hardest questions of work, responsibility, and life. You can use the five-question framework on your own or with others on your team to help you cut through complexities, understand critical trade-offs, and develop workable solutions for even the grayest issues.

The hardest choices are also the most consequential. So why do we know so little about how to get them right? Big, life-altering decisions matter so much more than the decisions we make every day, and they're also the most difficult: where to live, whom to marry, what to believe, whether to start a company, how to end a war. There's no one-size-fits-all approach for addressing these kinds of conundrums. Steven Johnson's classic Where Good Ideas Come From inspired creative people all over the world with new ways of thinking about innovation. In Farsighted, he uncovers powerful tools for honing the important skill of complex decision-making. While you can't model a once-in-a-lifetime choice, you can model the deliberative tactics of expert decision-makers. These experts aren't just the master strategists running major companies or negotiating high-level diplomacy. They're the novelists who draw out the complexity of their characters' inner lives, the city officials who secure long-term water supplies, and the scientists who reckon with future challenges most of us haven't even imagined. The smartest decision-makers don't go with their guts. Their success relies on having a future-oriented approach and the ability to consider all their options in a creative, productive way. Through compelling stories that reveal surprising insights, Johnson explains how we can most effectively approach the choices that can chart the course of a life, an organization, or a civilization. Farsighted will help you imagine your possible futures and appreciate the subtle intelligence of the choices that shaped our broader social history.