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Here's the Review in Brief for Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls by Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis. See below for the Review in Depth.

How this book is different:

The authors write about a process of judgment that includes preparation (including naming and framing the issue), the decision, and execution and adaptation. This is virtually unique among writers on business judgment, most of whom treat decision as something the leader does and execution as something followers do.

This process is much more real world than I've seen elsewhere. Unlike overly rational models, it stresses the need for both logic and "feel." Unlike straight-line, one-time-through models it includes adaptation and re-do loops.

This is a comprehensive approach. The authors see the process in time as one dimension of judgment. Others are domains (people, strategy, and crisis), and constituencies. They also say that a leader needs four kinds of knowledge to be effective: self-knowledge, social network knowledge, organizational knowledge, and contextual knowledge.

Strengths:

A simple, yet sophisticated and easy to understand and implement process for making judgment calls. It identifies long term success as the sole measure of good judgment. You can use this process in any kind of organization.

Excellent writing that combines research from a number of fields with good storytelling. The stories are long enough to make several points. They include stories where things didn't work right the first time.

A "Handbook for Leadership Judgment" that follows the main book and gives you a way to apply the insights in your own situation.

There are excellent descriptions of workshop and learning processes that you can take and modify to suit.

Warnings:

The authors write mostly about organizations that they've been involved with and that leads to two problems. They include judgments that haven't met their own test of long term success. And, they've often drunk their own Kool-Aid and present things as seen from the executive suite and not from either the front line or the outside.

There's a lot of GE here because Tichy's been involved with GE since the 60s. Sometimes that means he settles for an easy to find GE example instead of digging out a better example from elsewhere.

There's no discussion of how a CEO gets information or sorts wheat from chaff. Those are important parts of decision making.

This book, like too many others, is written as if the reader is a big company CEO. While the points are all good, the perspective means you will have to do some adapting.

Bottom Line:

This is a must-read for business leaders.

Now for the Review in Depth.

"With good judgment, little else matters. Without it, nothing else matters."

That's one reason why Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis wrote Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls. The other belief is that the study and literature of judgment don't offer much helpful guidance for business leaders.

In thirteen chapters, the authors set out to remedy the lack. They come to the task with two important qualifications. Both are students of the subject and they offer us a blend of research from a variety of disciplines. Both have spent a lot of time "hanging out" with leaders and they bring us the stories of what they've seen.

The first chapter, Judgment and Leadership drives their stakes firmly into the ground. They tell us that making judgment calls is the essential job of a leader.

They also set long term success as the sole measure of good judgment. This is a bit of a problem because several of their examples have only recently gone through their decision process. Jeff Immelt's judgments may be great, for example, but it's too soon to tell if they meet the test of long term success.

This is also the chapter where the authors identify execution as part of the decision process. Most other writers on business decision making take us only up to the point of decision and leave execution as if were foreordained by a good decision.

Other writers see decision making as the work of the leader and execution as the work of his or her subordinates. Making follow-up and follow-through a part of the judgment process makes this book truly valuable.

Because they see the process as including execution and adaptation they avoid the overly rational, straight-line models of other writers. This gives us an understanding of judgment more likely to work in the real world.

The second chapter, Framework for Leadership Judgment, defines judgment as a process, not an event. The process involves recognizing the need for a decision, "naming and framing" the call, and execution and adjustment.

The authors also define the three critical domains where a leader will make decisions. They are people, strategy, and crisis. Effective judgments in people often prevent poor strategy judgments and the need for crisis judgments.

Having a Storyline is a chapter about what the authors call "Teachable Points of View," inevitably shortened to TPOV. We're told to imagine the better future and develop compelling and practical storylines to help others understand the issues and decision.

Chapter 4 is about how a leader must have Character and Courage. That means having clear standards and the strength to maintain those standards in the face of pressure and the challenge of obstacles. They tell us that "Character without courage is meaningless. Courage without good character is dangerous."

With a clear idea of the process and the importance of storylines and character, the authors are ready to start devoting chapters to judgment calls in the three domains. They start with People Judgment Calls because they see them as the platform for good strategic and crisis judgments.

Selecting a CEO is the most important judgment call and we're told that hiring from outside signals a failed process. There are plenty of good and bad examples of CEO Succession processes.

A lot of time is spent on the GE succession processes for both Jack Welch and Jeff Immelt. The authors point out that at GE there are lots of people doing lots of assessments which helps make succession effective throughout the organization. They also note that the board is only involved in the succession process for CEO, adding another level of assessment that includes outsiders.

Chapter 7 is devoted to Strategy Judgments. Strategy judgments constantly evolve and should be made by the CEO, not some corporate planning staff. The authors make a key point that's often overlooked, that the best strategic judgments are a mix of logic and feel, of left brain and right brain.

If you ever wondered where Noel Tichy has spent most of his time, all the references to GE in this book will give you the answer. Chapter 8 is entirely devoted to Jeff Immelt's Strategy Judgments at GE.

There are three key insights in Chapter 9, Crisis Judgments. Bad judgments in people or strategy are a common cause of crises. Leaders need to take personal responsibility for handling crises. And, a common mistake is to lose sight of your overall mission. Once a crisis happens, teamwork and focus make the difference.

Bennis and Tichy suggest that we see Crisis as a Leadership Development Opportunity in chapter 10. The basic points they make in this chapter are good ones. You should prepare in advance for crises because when they happen it's too late for thoughtful decision-making. And the crisis can provide you with a wonderful opportunity to use meeting the challenge as a form of leadership development.

This chapter also illustrates a weakness in the book. The authors were involved in many of the processes they describe. That's good. It gives them first hand experience.

The problem is that it leads them to write about situations that simply haven't played out enough to meet their test for long term success. Jeff Immelt's strategic judgments are one example. Another is Circuit City which gets lots of ink in this chapter.

Circuit City also illustrates the willingness of the authors to take what client top management tells them at face value. How else to describe the way they deal with Circuit City's layoffs of their top sales staff in the stores to replace them with less expensive (and less knowledgeable) people.

The authors tell us "The judgment to make cuts was good. The PR was not so good." In reality more than the PR was not so good.

The layoffs were ham-handed at best. They removed knowledgeable sales staff from the stores, resulting in far lower add-on business.

The way things were handled was also completely at odds with the CEO's TPOV that "what is good for associates is also what helps customers." In fact, Circuit City fired the very associates who could help customers the most and replaced them with low-wage "tag readers."

Chapter 11 builds on the Knowledge Creation theme. There are three key points. Leaders should critique their own performance. Knowledge creation for all levels should be an explicit goal. And frontline employees are the new knowledge workers. The authors identify four kinds of knowledge that leaders need to make effective judgments: self-knowledge, social network knowledge, organizational knowledge, and contextual knowledge.

Then we come to chapter 12 which is the story of the New York City Leadership Academy. On the one hand, this is a good, comprehensive case that is well rendered. But it's also a very different leadership situation for everything else in the book. A comprehensive business case would have been better. So would eliminating this chapter entirely.

After a short (2 page) Conclusion, the book is filled out with a Handbook for Leadership Judgment. It covers the same ground as the main book, but with lots of questions and charts. It's a good addition because it gives you a way to consolidate personal lessons.

This is a superbly-written business book by two experts in the field who share both research and excellent teaching stories. Their core insight (that execution is part of judgment) is powerful and different from other business authors. Their simple process will be usable by all business leaders.

If you are in business and make decisions, you should read Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.

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Wally Bock has helped people learn to be great bosses for more than a quarter century. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless by teaching through a story and providing lists of resources for further growth.

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