Left Brain, Right Stuff: How Leaders Make Winning Decisions

Dozens of books have been published recently on the errors and biases that affect our judgments and choices. Drawing on cognitive science, their lessons are excellent for many kinds of decisions - consumer choice and financial investments, for example - but stop short of addressing many of the most important decisions we face in management, where we can actively influence outcomes and where competitive forces mean we have to outperform rivals. As Phil Rosenzweig shows, drawing on examples from business, sports and politics, this sort of decision-making relies on mastering two very different abilities. First, the analytical problem-solving skills associated with the brain's left hemisphere; and second, what Tom Wolfe called 'the Right Stuff': the ability to take calculated risks. Bringing fresh and often surprising insights to topics including confidence and overconfidence, the uses and limits of decision models, leadership and authenticity, expert performance and deliberate practice, competitive bidding and new venture management, Left Brain, Right Stuff, the myth-busting follow-up to The Halo Effect, explains how to perform when making even the most difficult decisions.

About the Author :
Phil Rosenzweig has been a marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard and a Professor at Harvard Business School. Currently he is a Professor at IMD, where he works with leading companies on questions of strategy and organisation. He has taught extensively in executive programs around the world. He is the author of the best-selling The Halo Effect.

Review :
Phil Rosenzweig has a gift for puncturing conventional business nostrums with hard data and critical analysis. And for writing business books that you can actually read for pleasure. This fine book argues that the accepted tenets of behavioural economics are inadequate when dealing with strategic decisions in which the players can influence the outcome. The gripping stories neatly reveal the true complexity that is not captured in laboratory experiments, and put a needed reality-check on the standard dogma of decision-making. Essential reading. Left Brain, Right Stuff will help (force) you to rethink what you thought you knew about behaviour and decision-making. It will show you how to avoid the traps that have been set by some very popular (and dangerously erroneous) writings on the topic. This book will surprise you, it will challenge your (and your colleagues') thinking in a very productive way, and it will be fun to read. Read it twice: once for the enjoyment of it, and once for pragmatic applications. It is certain to provoke the right kinds of discussions within your management team, and to raise your organization's hit rate for effective decision-making. With compelling accounts and research results, Phil Rosenzweig take us through the world of big, strategic decisions. They are thorny, complex, and risky, and he shows that they require analytic thinking, intuitive judgment, and personal confidence without certitude. Left Brain, Right Stuff delivers an invaluable framework for making good and timely decisions by all who sit in a leadership chair. Left Brain, Right Stuff intrigued me on a number of levels. By parsing strategic situations, Rosenzweig convinces that we control more than we think we do. Go one more step - by believing in ourselves, we increase the probability of a great outcome. Then add in what happens in 'winner takes all' environments and the need to assess relative performance (not objective performance), and my eyes were opened wide. No one thinks as clearly - and writes as clearly - as Phil Rosenzweig does about the diagnostic challenges of assessing the quality of business judgment and about the prescriptive challenges of improving it. Praise for The Halo Effect: 'One of the most important management books of all time A telling indictment of the superficiality of much management literature ... explained with wit and vigour As an antidote to the hype and nonsense that gets written about business, it is perfect. Rosenzweig is the Henry Fonda of the business world - juror number eight, constantly prodding us and asking: 'Are you sure? How do you know?' Feisty and entertaining Offers a different slant on how successful businessmen and other leaders assess risk ... a provocative reconsideration of the power of positive thinking