The Go Point: When It's Time to Decide--Knowing What to Do and When to Do It (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Useem fashions a template for seeing ahead.”
—Boston Globe

“Great decisions are the hallmark of a successful executive. In The Go Point, Michael Useem provides invaluable insight into how to make the critical call.”
—Larry Bossidy, retired chairman and CEO of Honeywell International and coauthor of Execution and Confronting Reality

“The Go Point is a tour de force of a tour through battlefields and boardrooms, illuminating the differences between brilliant and tragic decisions. Michael Useem is a wise, witty, and understanding guide whose insights can dramatically improve leadership and decision-making skills. Go for it!”
—Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School, bestselling author of Confidence: How Winning Streaks & Losing Streaks Begin and End

“Michael Useem . . . spells out in plain English the consequences of making hard and fast decisions, when they matter most and impact teams of people. There are plenty of books on leadership, but few that explain how to take a team from one place to the next. This one is the best.”
—Maria Bartiromo, journalist and CNBC anchor

“This exciting book is a valuable guide to effective decision making. The Go Point’s great strength is to put the reader inside the heads of fascinating, often heroic people as they seek to ‘get it right,’ under pressure and with incomplete information.”
—Steven Kerr, managing director and chief learning officer, Goldman Sachs & Co.

“In The Go Point, Michael Useem identifies the essence of what it takes to prepare for moments of decision. He draws from an array of compelling accounts to help us appreciate what is essential for decisive decision making when it really counts.”
—Peter M. Dawkins, vice chairman, Citigroup Global Wealth Management, U.... --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Review

“Useem fashions a template for seeing ahead.”
—Boston Globe

“Great decisions are the hallmark of a successful executive. In The Go Point, Michael Useem provides invaluable insight into how to make the critical call.”
—Larry Bossidy, retired chairman and CEO of Honeywell International and coauthor of Execution and Confronting Reality

“The Go Point is a tour de force of a tour through battlefields and boardrooms, illuminating the differences between brilliant and tragic decisions. Michael Useem is a wise, witty, and understanding guide whose insights can dramatically improve leadership and decision-making skills. Go for it!”
—Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School, bestselling author of Confidence: How Winning Streaks & Losing Streaks Begin and End

“Michael Useem . . . spells out in plain English the consequences of making hard and fast decisions, when they matter most and impact teams of people. There are plenty of books on leadership, but few that explain how to take a team from one place to the next. This one is the best.”
—Maria Bartiromo, journalist and CNBC anchor

“This exciting book is a valuable guide to effective decision making. The Go Point’s great strength is to put the reader inside the heads of fascinating, often heroic people as they seek to ‘get it right,’ under pressure and with incomplete information.”
—Steven Kerr, managing director and chief learning officer, Goldman Sachs & Co.

“In The Go Point, Michael Useem identifies the essence of what it takes to prepare for moments of decision. He draws from an array of compelling accounts to help us appreciate what is essential for decisive decision making when it really counts.”
—Peter M. Dawkins, vice chairman, Citigroup Global Wealth Management, U.S. Army Brigadier General (Ret.)

“How does any leader know what to do and when to do it? Here Michael Useem, one of America’s foremost thinkers about leadership, unravels that mystery in a fast-paced, well-written, and unforgettable book. Highly recommended for everyone with courage for the arena!”
—David Gergen, professor of public service, director, Center for Public Leadership, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

“In his latest book, Michael Useem walks you up close to your moment of decision, and, with examples from some of the most pivotal go points in human endeavor, shows you how to master it. This is by far the most practical book on decision making I have ever read.”
—Marcus Buckingham, author of First, Break All the Rules; Now, Discover Your Strengths; and The One Thing You Need to Know

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Crown Business (October 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400082986
• ISBN-13: 978-1400082988
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #588,418 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Practical and Insightful Must-Have for all Decision-Makers, October 26, 2006

By	John Baldoni - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Facing a major decision in your life? Pick up a copy of "The Go Point"! Michael Useem explores the process of how leaders make decisions, that is, to go or not go. The way he does it is masterful. "The Go Point" operates on three levels: one, it's a terrific narrative; two, it is an exploration of the decision-making process from a leadership perspective; and three, it's a self-paced course in decision-making. The leaders Useem profiles are taken from the front and the back pages of history, business and current events. All the leadership stories works to illuminate the factors that go into decisions. An added plus is that each chapter ends with a summary of points that identify key aspects to decision-making that readers are encouraged to discover from the narrative and then compare to the printed results. "The Go Point" is a book that every decision-maker at every level will want to read, study, and put into practice. It is a treasure.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Decision-Making Excellence, November 28, 2006

By	C. S. Clarke "C.S. Clarke, Ph.D., Psychologist" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Michael Useem is a fine storyteller. And he is an instructor who can clearly delineate the principles and processes of the subject he is teaching. He combines his abilities to create a high-impact learning experience in one book.

Experiential learning is the best learning, but you don't have enough time in your life to learn all you need to know from your own immediate experience. However you can learn most of what you need to know from the experience of others. This book contains excellent experience relevant to good decision-making. And it tells of experiences that are in and of themselves exciting and interesting. They are real-life examples of the principles and skills the author is teaching.

He seamlessly weaves into his stories his instruction of the principles and skills of making good decisions. Then, at the end of each chapter, he offers a chart of those principles and skills for your review, relating them back to the stories. So you get "this is why 1,2,3...this is how 1,2,3..and this is what success and or failure looks like in real life." All of this is wrapped up in a presentation that reads like a novel.

This book is a must-have for leaders and decision-makers of all kinds. it is enjoyable to read, and everyone will learn something new and useful from it.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Leaders Manual to Making Better Decisions, February 2, 2007

By	Peter A. Mello "Weekly Leader (http://weeklyl... (Mattapoisett, MA) - See all my reviews

I finally had the chance to sit down with Michael Useem's newest book, The Go Point. I am really interested in his work and enjoyed several of his earlier books including Upward Bound: Nine Original Accounts of How Business Leaders Reached Their Summits (with Paul Asel), Leading Up: How to Lead Your Boss So You Both Win and The Leadership Moment: Nine True Stories of Triumph and Disaster and Their Lessons for All of Us.

Michael Useem is the Wiliam and Jacalyn Egan Professor of Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, as well as the director of its Center for Leadership and Change Management.

In October 2005, I had the good fortune to participate in Wharton's Executive Education Program The Leadership Journey which is lead by Professors Useem and Greg Shea. As its name implies, its is a weeklong intensive experience uniquely exploring leadership from academic and personal perspectives. This was clearly one of the most significant adult learning experiences that I have ever had and I was looking forward to reading The Go Point.

Well, I was not disappointed. I really enjoyed this book and, not surprisingly, part of the reason is that it followed much of the same format and covered similar material as The Leadership Journey.

The full title is The Go Point - When It's Time to Decide, Knowing What to Do and When to Do It and Useem effectively uses storytelling techniques to explore how decisions are made and to present his case. In the preface, he describes "go points" as "times to decide, moments for saying yes or no, instants for jumping in one direction or another when the fate of others depends on it." He lays out the book's objective of "building a decision-making template, the principles and tools for being decisive at times when it really counts: using small steps to make hard decisions, building a network of counselors for testing ideas, keeping options open until they must be closed." And in the Introduction he defines a go point as - "that decisive moment when the essential information has been gathered, the pros and cons weighed and the time has come to get off the fence.'

The author uses a number of interesting and impactful case studies including the July 1994 wildfire on Colorado's Storm King Mountain which had fatal consequences for 14 wildland firefighters, the Gettysburg Battle of the American Civil War that took more than 50,000 Confederate and Union soldiers lives over 3 days, and the 1972 plane crash in the Andes where 16 passengers survived in the incredibly harsh environment with virtually no resources for 72 days. There are lots of lessons to learn from analyzing the decision chains that lead to the final outcome in each story. Useem uses each to demonstrate the importance of having a decision template "generic enough to apply to many situations, yet specific enough to provide real guidance with real-life choices."

What has always interested my in Professor Useem's work is how experience informs leadership and decisionmaking. He states

"(decision) template principles should be rooted in tangible experiences, for that often serves as the most enduring and powerful trigger....My own experience with hands-on-learning as well as volumes of research confirm that principles such as these are best retained and recalled when discovered during moments of intense emotion and acute stress. Embedded in experience, they remain unforgettable."

Useem and some of his colleagues and students actually took a "staff ride" and visited Storm King Mountain to try to get a better understanding of what the wild firefighters encountered that fateful day and he writes:

"Personal engagements of this kind can cut through the fog of abstraction and connect theory with practice more powerfully than virtually any other learning event....Classrooms are an excellent vehicle for acquiring decision theory; tangible venues are the indelible vehicles for remembering how to apply it."

My personal experience reinforces this view. One day during The Leadership Journey we boarded a bus at Wharton and drove out to the Gettysburg National Military Park for a full day tour of the battlefield with a certified guide. To stand on Little Round Top or Cemetery Hill is an incredibly emotional, intellectual and spiritual experience. We often feel that our current world is so complex; however, to think about what it would have been like as a battlefield commander with scant information and limited time to act or react is mindboggling.

Chapter 5 - Making Decisions is devoted to the reader actually getting engaged in some decisionmaking exercises. We also performed these at Wharton with my favorite being Necklace Trading. While the author does a great job of explaining these exercises, nothing can compare to the actual process of participation. The book's website [...] actually provides for some reader interaction but I did not try it out.

While Professor Useem is one of the top professors at one of the top business schools in the world, he writes in a very easy to read fashion. Readers don't encounter any jargon or buzzwords. Instead, he uses stories to effectively and powerfully convey his points.

Anyone interested in how leaders make decisions, good and bad, must read this book. It will certainly give the you a lot to think about in how you approach important decisions and how you can improve the process by establishing your own decisionmaking template.