The Thinking Manager's Toolbox: Effective Processes for Problem Solving and Decision Making [Hardcover]

William J. Altier (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 18, 1999

In this indispensable book, a widely experienced business consultant provides a complete set of analytical tools essential to successful trouble-shooting, effective planning, and making better decisions faster, more confidently, and more often.
How can you help your company solve a problem in just a few days that's been plaguing managers for three months? How can you bring a room of executives to a consensus on a critical decision that the CEO and his committee have been wrestling with for years? Of course, this is easier said than done. Indeed, not a week goes by without a major business media story about a company that has fallen on hard times and an executive that has resigned for "personal reasons." The root of the failure is usually ineffective decision-making processes, and ultimately, bad decisions. In The Thinking Manager's Toolbox, veteran consultant and renowned business thinker William J. Altier cogently presents the underpinnings of successful thinking processes and their applications, drawing on practical, real-world experiences. The first section explores the fundamentals of thinking, change, and the critical role that sound thinking processes play in effective problem solving. The second section, your basic toolbox, develops five, in-depth fundamental thinking processes. And a third section, the advanced toolbox, develops more specialized applications for creative problem solving.
Here then is a valuable primer for anyone, whether a middle manager or a CEO, seeking to solve problems and make better decisions more efficiently. The Thinking Manager's Toolbox is an invaluable resource for those seeking to develop the fundamental thinking processes necessary to perform with excellence.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

William J. Altier believes that many companies fail because their leaders don't know how to think objectively. The Thinking Manager's Toolbox is Altier's front-office prescription for right thinking. He writes, "In medicine, in flying, in golf, it's the knowledge of the processes involved and the skill and experience built up by continually using them that separates the leaders from the also-rans. The same is true in business, in government, in teaching, in every profession." The book is a manual for developing a set of "thinking tools" for making choices, defining steps, timing decisions, preventing errors, and finding the root causes of unexpected change. Say you're a manager of a plant under expansion--Altier shows ways to uncover potential problems and nip them before they develop. He loads the book with written exercises, advice for teams, and step-by-step examples for planning. The Thinking Manager's Toolbox is sometimes highly technical, but provides key advice for managers looking to make the right decisions. --Dan Ring

Review

"Important, useful, and practical advice for more effective problem solving and decision making are integrated with in a more comprehensive view of management."--Chris Argyris, Harvard Business School, and author of Knowledge for Action and Organizational Learning II

"Whether you are a project engineer solving problems, a business person making decisions or a CEO planning for the future, there is a thinking process tool to help you do it better. Bill Altier's 'Toolbox" is a potential competitive advantage--use it before your competitors do."--Nance K. Dicciani, Senior Vice President, Rohm and Hass Company

"The Thinking Manager's Toolbox offers a clear and concise guide to improving one's decision making and problem solving skills. Having used these techniques with excellent results, I highly recommend this work."--John K. Herdklotz, former president of Hoechst-Roussel Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (November 18, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195131967
• ISBN-13: 978-0195131963
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #134,767 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, Real Help For Unproductive Meetings, December 1, 1999

By 

Ken Wing (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Thinking Manager's Toolbox: Effective Processes for Problem Solving and Decision Making (Hardcover)

Meetings are the bane and lifeblood of managers everywhere. Vitally important, they are also frustratingly ineffective. Like the old story of the blind men and the elephant, meetings are usually more of a political contest among competing pet ideas than a cooperative effort among people with differing perspectives and relevant information.

The usual diagnosis of this situation is that it's a "people problem." Thus, we have sent millions of individuals to interpersonal-skills training, communication-skills training and dealing-with-difficult-people training. We've sent thousands of groups off on retreat to rappel down rock faces and fall blindfolded into their colleague's arms. We've fielded an army of specialized facilitators to say, "Thank you for sharing that," and "Suzie, we've haven't heard from you, yet."

But the treatment hasn't worked. Meetings still stink. And the things meetings are supposed to produce--decisions, plans, and solutions--have not improved either.

In this important book, Altier approaches the problem from a completely different perspective. He argues that the fundamental problem with meetings is their lack of a disciplined, organized process for joint thinking. Focusing on decisions, plans and solutions as the key outputs created by managers, Altier describes in detail three separate, structured processes that remake meetings devoted to these ends.

The process for solving problems is my favorite. Using a real but disguised example, Altier shows what a structured, disciplined thinking process can accomplish. Engineers had spent three months twisting knobs and replacing parts in series of failed efforts to solve a serious but intermittent manufacturing problem. Yet 20 hours of disciplined analysis by the same people found the cause, just by thinking together in a different way. At one point, I was so engrossed in the story, I darn near failed to get off my train at my stop.

As this example makes clear, this is no theoretical book, but a practical guide grounded in real world experience. The benefit of Altier's deep experience with these processes is evident in his cautions about places where participants or meeting leaders can intentionally or unintentionally sabotage them, his recommendations about ways to keep them practical and result-focused, and his discussions of ways to avoid their contamination by our usual fuzzy thinking in the form of implicit, unwarranted assumptions about the nature of the task or problem.

While there have been hundreds of academic books hawking "decision science" and similar nostrums, Altier's book is unique in bringing structured thinking processes together with the reality that meetings are filled with intelligent people with egos. It's also unique in allowing scope for hunch and gut feel to serve the process without taking it over. Altier's approaches have been honed by over 20 years of experience leading real people in real situations through meetings like those described in the book. If you're frustrated by poor meetings in your organization that lead to weak decisions, plans or solutions, read this book.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Do you want to see people actually solve problems together?, November 22, 2000

By 

Norman Eckstein (Winnetka, Illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Thinking Manager's Toolbox: Effective Processes for Problem Solving and Decision Making (Hardcover)

If you would like to see people actually solve problems together, then get this book and use the techniques Bill Altier describes. As a consultant who uses the tools described here, I can verify that they work. The thrill never ceases to watch a group of diverse people - from different groups and levels of an organization - learn that they can, in fact, work together, that among them they have the knowledge and creativity to solve problems and develop strategies.

For people who are resistant to have a team attack a problem because meetings are unproductive, this book will show you that it is the way the meeting is run that is not productive. It is the thinking process that gets the result, whether for an individual or a group, and this book shows how much better that result can be from a group.

This is not a "light-reading" pleasure book, but it is well worth the effort. It gives a great deal of detail on why and how the tools work and how to apply them. If you are willing to wade in and try these techniques, you will be surprised at how much better at problem solving both you and your people are. They may even find they like working together.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for managers and consultants, December 6, 1999

By 

D. CINGORANELLI (Colorado) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Thinking Manager's Toolbox: Effective Processes for Problem Solving and Decision Making (Hardcover)

This book is an excellent tool for any manager or management consultant. The examples are terrific, and the presentation is as logical as the processes covered in the book. Users of Bill Altier's approach and tools will benefit greatly from the higher quality thinking that they produce.