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
This review is from: The Go Point: When It's Time to Decide--Knowing What to Do and When to Do It (Hardcover)
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.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stories plus Structure = Excellent Book, January 30, 2007
This review is from: The Go Point: When It's Time to Decide--Knowing What to Do and When to Do It (Hardcover)
The GO Point by Michael Useem is a book you should read.
Thousands of business books are published every year. A few hundred offer important insights. Another few hundred are easy and fun to read. This is the first business book I've read in a long time that meets all my criteria for a great business book
*It is about an important business topic: decision making.
*It is based on solid research.
*It covers a broad range of applications.
*It uses stories and examples to make it easy to read and learn.
*It uses structured writing to group key points and makes them usable.
At the outset, Useem tells us that he'll do two things in the book.
First, he'll take us inside the heads of decision makers. Some of those are living people that Useem has interviewed. Others are historical figures like Robert E. Lee.
Useem takes us inside those head by means of stories, the way that humans have always shared experience with each other. This book is filled with great and useful stories because Useem has developed a vast fund of stories and because he is one of the best storytellers among current management writers.
In addition to the stories, Useem has created "templates" for handling different decision challenges. He groups the key learning points together, using a technique called structured writing to make the points easy to select and use.
Each template is devoted to a specific kind of decision challenge. The bulk of the book lays out the challenges, beginning with urgent decisions.
Urgent decisions are decisions that must be made right away. Useem covers those in the chapter called "In the Heat of the Moment."
The chapter called "Getting into the Decision Game" addresses a common problem: how do you know when it's time to act? You'll pick up tips on when to quit gathering information and plunge ahead with a decision and when to hold off making a decision until you understand the situation better.
"Using the Net" doesn't have anything to do with computers. Instead it's about using advisors to gather both information and perspective. There's some especially insightful material on using an "outer network" of advisors to avoid groupthink.
The chapter on "Seeing Ahead" addresses issues of prediction. Useem uses decisions made at the battle of Gettysburg to show how each decision affects the possible range and importance of future decisions.
The chapter called "Making Decisions" offers an opportunity for you to try your hand at applying the lessons presented in earlier chapters. Useem stresses the importance of making a decision and moving ahead when the time is right. This chapter is one of the things that make this book both valuable and useful.
The final chapters in the book cover special situations. There's a chapter on ethics called "Transcending Personal Profit" and an excellent chapter on the dumb things that smart decision makers often do. That one's called "Avoiding Unforced Errors."
Michael Useem has created a book that you should read if making decisions is part of what your do and you'd like to make better decisions. But he's also created a book that will give you insight into how people think about decisions and then act on that thought.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Leaders Manual to Making Better Decisions, February 2, 2007
This review is from: The Go Point: When It's Time to Decide--Knowing What to Do and When to Do It (Hardcover)
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.
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