Think Again Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How To Keep It From Happening To You by Sidney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead, and Andrew Campbell

Think Again Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How To Keep It From Happening To You by Sidney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead, and Andrew Campbell

This book is about decisionmaking. It describes many examples of how and why leaders fail. The focus is on recent discoveries about neuroscience. There are many descriptions on why past experience and emotional attachments are central to decisionmaking. Often experience and feelings can be misleading and it is very hard for an individual to think differently. Safeguards outside of a person in a leadership role are often needed.

This book describes how past experience by leaders often led to disastrous mistakes. Some examples are hurricane Katrina, Admiral Yamamoto's loss at Midway during World War II, and Samsung corporations failed foray into automobile manufacturing. These and other examples are analyzed from the viewpoint of creating checks outside the leader to prevent mistakes.

What is described here in detail is how people fail. Appendix I The Database of Cases is all examples of how people failed because of misleading experience, prejudgments, excessive self interest, and inappropriate attachments.

All of the solutions are presented in the second appendix in hypothetical form. I have a bit of a hard time accepting that the solutions given will work. The authors would have done better to also include some case studies of how things go right. It is very hard to know if the solutions presented will work.

If you want to learn why people fail because of excessive reliance on past experience or emotional attachments this book is excellent. This really is the main focus on the book. It will help a person catch their mistakes and maybe, it might help create safeguards against disaster.