Description:
Even Hamlet, that famous equivocator, might not have been so stymied by the question "To be or not to be?" if he'd had this snappy little 72-pager on hand to help him make up his mind. Here, you'll find quick-and-dirty advice on the crucial three phases of making a tough decision, both on and off the job: identifying your unique decision-making style, and weighing it against your organizational culture; reaching a decision by identifying the key issues and people to involve, generating ideas and assessing their validity, gathering information and using models, minimizing risk and employing fail-safe strategies, and getting approval and support for your final decision; and implementing your decision, from communicating it to others and overcoming objects to it to monitoring its progress and building on it over time. On every page here, boxed tips, mini case studies, handy checklists, and easy-to-follow flow charts help you through the process--including how to handle other people's decisions and assess your own decision-making ability. Granted, if you're looking for very specific or in-depth guidance, you might find this book too cursory and general in its approach. But, if you're looking for a thumbnail guide to the basics, it'll do just fine. It's worth mentioning that the book is part of the "Essential Managers" series by reference publisher Dorling-Kindersley--a series comprising 20 itty-bitty books on business and career topics that range from communication, leadership, and decision-making to the management of time, budgets, change, meetings, people, projects, and teams. Combining the talent of the "For Dummies" book series for breaking down a lot of information into bite-sized bits and sidebars with Dorling-Kindersley's signature design style of crisp, classy graphics on a gleaming white backdrop, the books don't represent the cutting edge of business thinking or reflect necessarily any unique individual perspective. Instead, it's as if someone had collated the best general thinking on these 20 topics, and rolled them out into 72 brightly designed and easy-to-read pages--studded along the way with boxed tips, color shots of a multiracial cast of "coworkers" animatedly hashing through the workplace issues of the day, and, on the last few pages of each volume, a self-test of one's skills in the topic at hand. Again, they're not for anyone who's looking for more in-depth or focused help on any of the covered subjects, but they're perfect as a quick general-interest reference; and, let's face it, they're so damn cute, and look so smart in a neat little stack or row, that probably you'll want to buy a whole bunch to give as gifts to your entire staff or department. --Timothy Murphy
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