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.

Daily Thoughts 8/9/2009

Mme Recamier in ihrer Wohnung 1824 Lithographie von Aubry-Lecomte nach de Juinne. A reworking of the famous David painting (from Wikimedia). The image was interesting.

Daily Thoughts 8/9/2009

Last night, I stayed up late reading Dean Koontz's Frankenstein City of Night. I found the book to be quite compelling. There is also a graphic novel of the series. I rather liked the website http://frankenstein.deankoontz.com/

I read some of Keeping Customers this afternoon. One of the key ideas that came across to me was that it is necessary to keep customers coming back and create a feedback loop where they tell you what they want, you provide it for them, and then they come back and ask for more.

Today, I did my exercises and watched Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Doctor Watson. This dvd was from 35mm films restored by the UCLA film and television archive. There is a booklet which comes with the films I watched this weekend which describes the films. The Voice of Terror was released in 1942, Sherlock Holmes is hired by an inner government group to find a saboteur broadcasting over the radio. He must stop the continued destruction of ships, factories, oil wells, trains, and munitions. It was a bit different watching this film. The director of the film added some war propaganda and a few very pretty blonde women to the story to make it more appealing.

I decided I wanted to get a better grip on the underlying concept of management. There are a few books which I think speak the language. I put a few books on hold, The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, Peter F. Drucker The Concept of the Corporation and The Practice of Management. The Practice of Management is supposed to be one of the first books to look at management as a separate disciple. I also am going to try and read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I could never really get into Rand's books that much. I have already read The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker and Good To Great by Jim Collins.