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Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work Hardcover – March 26, 2013

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Chip Heath (Author)
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Dan Heath (Author)
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Dan Heath (Author)
4.6 out of 5 stars 391 customer reviews
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  • Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 336 pages
  • Publisher: Crown Business; 1 edition (March 26, 2013)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0307956393
  • ISBN-13: 978-0307956392
  • Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1.2 x 8.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (391 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,397 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsA Helpful Guide to Making Better Decisions
By Mike Mertens on March 26, 2013
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
I highly recommend Decisive as a valuable aid to making more objective decisions. The Heath Brothers do a great job laying out a better and more memorable process for making decisions while illustrating the principles with a wide variety of examples. They begin by discussing how the normal decision making process proceeds in 4 steps, each of which has a "villain" that can negatively impact it. To quote from their introduction:
* You encounter a choice. But narrow framing makes you miss options.
* You analyze your options. But the confirmation bias leads you to gather self-serving information.
* You make a choice. But short-term emotion will often tempt you to make the wrong one.
* Then you live with it. But you'll often be overconfident about how the future will unfold

They spend the remainder of the book detailing a process to make better decisions - the WRAP process:
* Widen your options
* Reality Test Your Assumptions
* Attain Some Distance
* Prepare to Be Wrong

Each part of the process has several powerful ideas that are worth chewing on and implementing in the context of one's life. I have chosen a few of the ideas to give you a flavor of what is in store:

For widening your options, it is important to avoid a narrow frame. In order to make sure you challenge yourself to do this, they propose an idea called the Vanishing Options Test - what would you do if the current alternatives disappeared? Here is a key quote: "When people imagine that they cannot have an option, they are forced to move their mental spotlight elsewhere - really move it - often for the first time in a long while."
For Reality testing your assumptions.Read more ›
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3.0 out of 5 starsGood ideas delivered in a heavy, indirect and lengthy discussion.
By Mark P. McDonald VINE VOICE on April 3, 2013
Format: Hardcover
Chip and Dan Heath are known for writing insightful and approachable books like Switch. Their new book, Decisive does not follow this pattern. That simple statement required me to make a decision about this review. Writing a less than stellar review is often a challenge eliciting negative feedback when sharing reasons why something did not live up to your expectations or was worth the time to read.

We all make decisions and the top of making better decisions should have been a slam-dunk. While Decisive does deliver, particularly in the first few chapters, overall the messages in this book get lost. The book is too long, heavy and complex to be helpful, particularly covering a subject already treated by others.

The core messages of the book are sound and helpful. The book covers recognizes the challenges we face in making decisions:

> Forcing an either/or decision when its not needed
> Confirmation bias, when we seek and see only the data that supports our views
> Removing emotion from the decision making process
> Overconfidence in decision making that limits our ability to consider alternative

The answers to these challenges are a pop acronym WRAP that describes their four-step process to making better decisions.

> Widen your options
> Reality test your assumptions
> Attain distance before deciding
> Prepare to be wrong

These are commonsense and helpful ideas. They are the basis for an easy to understand, actionable set of tools, you are right. This is a case where the structure and prose gets in the way as the book uses 11 chapters to cover each letter of WRAP.Read more ›
5 Comments 135 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback...
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5.0 out of 5 starsHeath Brothers Hit Another Home Run
By Aaron Johnson on March 27, 2013
Format: Hardcover
Here are 3 aspects I've appreciated about Decisive

Readability: No one writes non-fiction business books like these guys. In parts, Decisive is hard to put down. If you've read Made to Stick, you'll see the authors practicing what they preach by applying their SUCCES principles to the format of this book (if you haven't read it, then get it).

Gives You Language: Three of us in our department at work got a copy of Decisive and it comes up in conversation everyday. The Heath brothers have given us language like: "ooching", "setting tripwires", "widen our options,"narrow framing, and "What would have to be true for this to be the best option?" This is kind of language has the power to shape the culture of an organization.

Researched: I love the footnotes! Decisive is full of credible examples, and you can tell that the authors and their research team put in hundreds of hours exploring the topic of decision making. The result is a litany of real-life examples and the results of research studies put into layman's terms.
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5.0 out of 5 starsEnrich your decision-making toolkit
By Amy Tiemann VINE VOICE on March 26, 2013
Format: Hardcover
The Heath brothers' previous books Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die and Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard are mainstays on my book shelf, and now "Decisive" joins them as a worthy companion. It is pretty shocking to think how little education most of us get on the art of how to make decisions. This book arrived at a very opportune time for me, as it immediately helped think about two major life decisions in new ways. First, my family was thinking of buying a new house, one of a family's biggest purchases. When my husband and I were touring the home, the real estate agent said, "make a list of pros and cons as you think it over." As she said that, I thought how inadequate that seemed as a decision-making strategy. Later that day, I cracked open "Decisive" and the Heaths immediately offered novel alternatives to the "pros and cons list." These solid, research-tested ideas laid out in their "WRAP process" helped me realize that the costs of moving, both financial and opportunity costs of time, were too great, and we should learn to love our current home. Second, I am thinking about applying for a new job in a new field, and the advice to "ooch," to take a small step and experiment and try out the job (by shadowing someone who is already in the role), was right on target. Take a series of small steps before you leap into a major life change.

As "Decisive" can help us make decisions more wisely and thoughtfully, it proves its worth over and over again.Read more ›
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsa great book

the Heath brothers have written a great book

Published 1 day ago by A.I.
5.0 out of 5 starsMust read!

Great read, making an app thats based off these helpful techniques.

Published 1 month ago by Dillon Fosa
5.0 out of 5 starsI love the book so much that I have created a ...

Superlative book. I love the book so much that I have created a workshop that I have given to many groups of executives and they all find it invaluable. Read more

Published 2 months ago by Michael O'Brien
5.0 out of 5 starsA must have in any business book collection.

Another amazing book by Heath and Heath - a careful and well thought through review of the decision making process and where we can get hung up.

Published 2 months ago by Aaron Warner
4.0 out of 5 starsStrong evergreen advice on how to make better decisions amidst many,...

The reason why you need to read a book on how to make better decisions is because, based on cognitive research, human beings are wired to make less-than-wise decisions. Read more

Published 2 months ago by C.H.E. Sadaphal
5.0 out of 5 starsGood read and primer on decisions

Great book on decision making. Very practical and well researched. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to make better decisions.

Published 3 months ago
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

Absolutely a must for making better decisions

Published 3 months ago by peterbenner
5.0 out of 5 starsIf you need help making decisions read this book.

Very useful and informative book. I have just bought a second one for a friend. I think all the Heath brother's books are great.

Published 3 months ago by E. HARRIS
5.0 out of 5 starsStop the Angst, Decide!

Understanding the process of decision making, how to make great choices depends in much more than what its evident by our knowledge and experience (gut feeling), providing tools... Read more

Published 4 months ago by CoachEver
5.0 out of 5 starsFantastic book! Wish I had read this years ago

Fantastic book! Wish I had read this years ago. I wouldn't have made some of the bad decisions I've made!

Published 4 months ago by Linda

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