The Art of Critical Decision Making

By: Michael A. Roberto, The Great Courses

Narrated by: Michael A. Roberto

Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins

Publisher's summary

Learn to approach the critical decisions in your life with a more seasoned, educated eye with this fascinating 24-lecture series that explores how individuals, groups, and organizations make effective decisions. The heart of this accessible series is a thorough examination of decision making at three key levels. First, you'll look at decisions made at the individual level, where, among the many things you'll learn is that intuition is more than just a gut instinct and, in fact, represents a powerful pattern recognition capability. Then, you'll explore decisions made at the group level, where you'll try to answer the question of whether groups are "smarter" and more capable of making critical decisions than individuals. And finally, you'll pull back to analyze organizational decision making, in which Professor Roberto demonstrates how some organizations have encouraged and reliably performed vigilant decision making in the face of risky scenarios.

Whether you're the head of a Fortune 500 company, a government agency, or an everyday household, you constantly make decisions important to you and those immediately around you. These lectures offer you a toolbox of practical knowledge and skills that you can apply to various decisions - whether large or small - in your everyday life and work. Professor Roberto's lively lectures are packed with useful anecdotes, tools, and advice designed to improve your own ability to make informed decisions. As you explore the intriguing process of making a good decision, you'll strengthen your grip on individual theories of decision making and the situations that illustrate them.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

©2009 The Teaching Company, LLC (P)2009 The Great Courses

CRITICAL DECISION-DECISION MAKING

In the Great Courses’ lecture series, Dr. Michael Roberto, characterizes leadership in “The Art of Critical Decision Making”. Roberto’s primary methodology is examination of case studies that range from the Cuban missile crises, to the Daimler/Chrysler merger, to the 9/11/01 Trade Center bombing. He offers perspective on how good decisions can be made when complexity exceeds average to superior individual human capability.

Roberto’s argument is that a structured participatory process is the most consistently productive form of critical decision-making. Roberto infers, as the world becomes more complex, individual comprehension and patterning of facts becomes less reliable as a form of critical decision-making. His argument relies on leadership structure that insists on communication transparency and qualified freedom. Roberto suggests leaders elicit ideas from engaged people, rather than only experts, in making critical decisions meant to identify problems, proffer solutions, and accomplish goals.

Leaders need to engage employees whose ideas will be listened to, used, and appreciated rather than abjectly dismissed. Executives, who are more concerned about position than organizational effectiveness, are not leaders. They are cowards.

Fascinating articulation of personal, group and organization factors that hinder and drive good decision making

Loved it! Should be combined with more integration of negotiation and mediation technique. Highly recommended for all that care about organizational performance

more examples would have been added.sometimes same

Overall very good.but sometimes few incidences of the message were repeated a lot. so it would have been better to add new examples.

Very informative, and insightful. Well presented.

Very useful and practical information presented in a way that's​ easy to understand. Highly recommended​.

Great info, but...

Trying not to be over critical here, esp since I'm not use to lecture style presentations. I quickly began to suspect that the orator should've used notes instead of reading. I found it distracting to ingest the dialog while paying more attention to the phrasing of sentences. Still believe the time was well spent.

Excellent

We’ll structured, good content, and supplemental reading recommendations. Recommending to all of my DR’s and peers.

Loved this book it is a must read for any leader

Would you listen to The Art of Critical Decision Making again? Why?

Yes, great techniques on how to lead a team I have already started using some of the techniques at work.

What did you like best about this story?

Case method

What does Professor Michael A. Roberto bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

He is a really engaging story teller, I think in text it would be kinda of dead.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

No

Excellent Course

Extremely well organized and a good mix of theory and practical application. I’m going to have to listen many times to extract all the lessons.

Very Helpful

This book really helps you understand how to make good decisions. It also helps understand why the processes are effective.

Best of The Great Courses

I listen to many of the Great Courses lectures and this is the most interesting I have encountered. Dr. Roberto is an engaging narrator and the material provides terrific common sense guidance.