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How the Wise Decide: The Lessons of 21 Extraordinary Leaders, by Aaron Sandoski and Bryn Zeckhauser is a book that should be on your shelf of business books. The authors spent time interviewing twenty-one business leaders about key decisions they made and distilled the results into a package of sage advice that you can implement.

The book tells a series of stories each of which is chosen to illustrate a key point. After each cluster of stories, the authors suggest some rules that will help you implement it. Here's the outline of the book.

Go to the Source: Make it a habit and a priority to gather unfiltered information.

Make it routine
Develop permanent sources
Find out who's driving
Empathy is essential

Fill a Room with Barbarians: Bring together people with differing opinions and have them debate.

Require full participation
Forbid carryover
Seek diversity of opinion
Quash the pocket veto

Conquer the Fear of Risk: Understand risk and promote smart risk taking.

Identify what really drives risk
Reward people for taking smart risks
Test the waters before taking a plunge
Create a risk-tolerant environment
Ask: "What would it take?"

Make Vision Your Daily Guide: Make sure you have the right idea about where you should be going. Then stick to it.

Get the vision right
Convert your vision into priority objectives
Stay flexible

Listen with Purpose: Don't just listen intently. Know what you're listening for.

Ask the right questions
Challenge assumptions
Remember the implementers

Be Transparent: Be explicit about how and why a decision is made. Be explicit about how hard it will be to implement.

Be consistent
Dramatize critical decisions
Don't forget the follow-up
Conduct post-mortems

Some of these are just a touch fuzzy. But most of them provide solid guidance.

The book is well written, which is why you may remember the stories and learn something even if you don't commit the key points to memory.

If you make decisions of any kind, but particularly business decisions, you should read How the Wise Decide and keep it handy.

Additional Resources

How the Wise Decide will be an excellent companion to Judgment by Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis, which I reviewed here last year. Judgment gives a great framework for decision making, including the insight that the decision isn't made until it's fully implemented.

But the Tichy/Bennis book elaborated on that structure in a way that only the authors could love. It also had some suspect "good examples," such as Circuit City and its infamous firing of the best salespeople in its stores.

How the Wise Decide is much less structured, but much more practical. You'll get the best of both books if you take the overall structure that Judgment outlines and mate it to the specific "rules" from How the Wise Decide.

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.