New Insights on Leadership Decision-Making

ADAPTED FROM THE BOOK:  Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep It From Happening to You

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Syd Finkelstein is Professor of Management at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and faculty director of the Tuck Executive Program. His previous book Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You Can Learn From Their Mistakes has been a #1 bestseller in the U.S. and Japan.

CONTENT DESCRIPTION: In Think Again, a follow-up to his #1 bestseller, Why Smart Executives Fail, Sydney turns to major strategic decisions and numerous business cases to explain why decision-makers sometimes think they're right when they are actually wrong. The book not only documents why things go wrong, but also offers a series of solutions that reduce our vulnerability to fall into the traps that lead to bad decisions.

In light of the challenging business environment we are now facing, the lessons from this book are especially timely.

This download features Chapter one, “In the Eye of the Storm,” as well as the book’s introductory chapter. Telling the story of Matthew Broderick, then director of the Homeland Security Operations Center during Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, it illustrates both the way in which a person’s thinking can be blinded as well as the difficulty we have in challenging our thoughts so that we can spot and correct errors.

Fill out the information at right to receive this chapter and learn why Matthew Broderick is not the first manifestly competent leader to make an error of judgment, why he will not be the last – and why he got it wrong—very wrong….

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Reprinted with permission from Harvard Business Press. Excerpted from THINK AGAIN: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep It from Happening to You by Sydney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead, and Andrew Campbell.  Copyright 2008 Sydney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead, and Andrew Campbell. All rights reserved.