Make Better Decisions More Often: 30 Minute Reads: A Short Cut to More Effective Decision Making

By Nicholas Bate

You're half an hour away from never making a bad decision again!

Why not use your next spare half an hour to skill-up? Each of these short e-books can be read in just 30 minutes. Addressing those painful work problems, and giving practical tools and expert advice to overcome them, the 30 Minute Reads series will make your work-life more productive, less painful and more successful!

Decision making not your strong suit? Fed up of thinking 'I should have chosen the other candidate/strategy/sandwich'? This succinct, practical guide will teach you how to properly weigh up all the information and make well thought out decisions more quickly.

Also available in a digital bundle with 4 other titles as part of 30 Minute Reads: The business skills collection.

Make Better Decisions More Often will help you:

• Identify the problem and what isn't working
• Discover the 10 Big Strategies
• Put in place your super-structured, super-easy, 5-day count-down plan to no more pain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Dec 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9780857085054

Nicholas Bate

Nicholas Bate runs Strategic Edge Ltd, a consultancy that enables individuals to realise and release their full potential. He works extensively with individuals and teams in organisations as similar and different as Microsoft, Marks & Spencer, Philips Electronics and Hudson Global, Intel, as well as many non-corporate organisations.

Book preview

What will this book do for you?

Ever been stuck trying to decide what to do? The recruitment guy rang out of the blue to tell you about an amazing job with 20% more salary and a shorter commute and probably more prospects. Only trouble is you love your current job. You need to change your car; but which one? There's only so much money in the marketing budget, so where do you spend it? And – sigh – the nice guy you met on the art course and have been dating ever since. He asked you to get married! But are you ready?

Decisions. We all know what they are. This way or that way. That jumper or the other one. That route or this route. But do we know how to make them? And how to make the best one. Maybe you will be surprised …

Here's the structure of Make Better Decisions More Often

Section 1: The Decision Process. We'll kick off by reviewing the decision making process. How do we do it? Is it as logical as we thought?

Section 2: Tools to Decision Making 1: Data and evidence. How to get the facts, the evidence you need. This clearly has to be the bedrock of your decision-making process.

Section 3: Tools to Decision Making 2: Analy­sis. Now we have some facts we need to do some thinking and in particular we need to consider what we have now, what we want and our decision criteria.

Section 4: Tools to Decision Making 3: Brainstorm and incubation. We now move into looking at the possible solutions and how we start to move to THE solution.

Section 5: Tools to Decision Making 4: Boost­ing creativity. How to get more possible solutions upon which to decide.

Section 6: Tools to Decision Making 5: Take action. Making the decision. And making it happen.

Section 7: Decisions at Work 1: Teamwork. There are many challenges with work decisions, but certainly one is the messiness of so many people being involved and constantly having to battle with others. Here we look at the meetings and the teamwork part.

Section 8: Decisions at Work 2: Persuading, convincing and selling. And here we look at the selling, convincing and persuading part.

Section 9: Decisions at Home. How to make decisions from the smallest to the largest and often alone or with someone important in your life.

Section 10: Your Action Plan. Your personal checklist to success in any decision making, small or large. Work or home.

The majority of the sections will start with the big idea (e.g., gathering robust data) and then explain how to address that challenge in more detail. There will then be a mini case study: those with the same challenges you have, that we all have; this gives us a chance to see how they implement the concepts in a practical way. We'll also make sure your toughest questions are answered before a final summary. Everything in this book is tried and tested: it is both pragmatic and practical. We encourage you to start using the ideas immediately as that's the way this digital version was designed.

Read on …

1

The Decision Process

The Challenge

Most of us never really think about how we