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Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls
Portfolio Hardcover Product Details |
Product Description
?With good judgment, little else matters. Without it, nothing else matters.?
Whether we?re talking about United States presidents, CEOs, Major League coaches, or wartime generals, leaders are remembered for their best and worst judgment calls. In the face of ambiguity, uncertainty, and conflicting demands, the quality of a leader?s judgment determines the fate of the entire organization. That?s why judgment is the essence of leadership.
Yet despite its importance, judgment has always been a fairly murky concept. The leadership literature has been conspicuously quiet on what, exactly, defines it. Does judgment differ from common sense or gut instinct? Is it a product of luck? Of smarts? Or is there a process for making consistently good calls?
Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis have each spent decades studying and teaching leadership and advising top CEOs such as Jack Welch and Howard Schultz. Now, in their first collaboration, they offer a powerful framework for making tough calls when the stakes are high and the right path is far from obvious. They show how to recognize the critical moment before a judgment call, when swift and decisive action is essential, and also how to execute a decision after the call.
Tichy and Bennis bring their three-dimensional model to life with interviews with world-class leaders who have thrived or suffered because of their judgment calls. These stories include:
? Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, whose judgment to grow through research and development transformed GE into the world?s premier technology growth company.
? Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, who made tough calls about teachers, students, and parents while turning around a troubled school system.
? Jim McNerney, CEO of Boeing, whose strategic judgment helped him reinvigorate his company and restore a culture of trust and respect.
? The late general Wayne Downing, who found an unexpected opportunity in the midst of crisis when he led the Special Operations raid to capture Manuel Noriega.
? A. G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble, who bet $57 billion to purchase Gillette and reinvent his company.
? Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy, who made the call to commit totally to a customer-centric strategy and led his people to execute it.
Whether you?re running a small department or a global corporation, Judgment will give you a framework for evaluating any situation, making the call, and correcting if necessary during the execution phase. It will show you how to handle the overlapping domains of people, strategy, and crisis management. And it will help you teach your entire team to make the right call more often.
No organization can afford to neglect this crucial discipline?and no previous book has ever brought it into such clear focus.
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Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls
- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover; 2007-11-08
- Label: Portfolio Hardcover
- Format: Bargain Price
- Studio: Portfolio Hardcover
- Average Customer Review:
 based on 19 reviews
- Sales Rank in Books: #52124
Avg. Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: know how to lead, or teach others to lead 2008-10-12
Comment: Every professional, manager, consultant and entrepreneur should know how to lead, or teach others to lead. For a great companion to "thoughtleading" concepts found in my own book, "The Expert's Edge," get and read this book pronto!
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
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Summary: Savvy study of judgment and decision-making 2008-08-15
Comment: This book's focus fills a hole in the literature on leadership. Bestselling authors Noel M. Tichy and Warren G. Bennis concentrate on a key issue that is central to leadership: how leaders make judgment calls, and how you should make, execute and evaluate them. They provide a good, useful framework to guide your decision-making process. They offer intriguing tools, such as using a storyline to spur people to help implement your judgments. The book does have weaknesses, however, and those are due to the authors' definitions of two key terms: "results" and "long-term." While their case studies examine judgment calls they find successful, they define success as meeting "the espoused goals of the institution. Period." This assumes that the institution's goals are already examined and valid, when in many cases they are not. Their definition of "long-term" may strike some as only moderate in duration, or even as short-term. Nonetheless, their work is clearly written and rich in examples. getAbstract recommends it to anyone who is seriously interested in leadership, execution, and organizational strategy and culture.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
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Summary: Excellent leadership guide 2008-07-18
Comment: I very much recommend this book to anyone who faces the challenge of making judgment calls--which, as this book points out, is everyone. This book is inspiring, to the point, and well organized. However, it's most attractive feature is that the methods it suggests are proven through many examples. I think the other reviewers have said it best: this is simply the best framework for decision making on the market.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
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Summary: A Testament to Great CEO's 2008-06-16
Comment: I throughly enjoyed reading this book. I have studied Warren Bennis extensively within my Doctorate program in Organization Development. Tichy and Bennis are throughly enjoyable to read.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating:
Summary: A very useful framework for thinking through judgment and leadership 2008-05-19
Comment: If you are a manager who wants to develop the skills of executive management, this book is for you. The authors provide a methodology that is not simple, but still quite understandable. It would be ideal for a course of MBA or Executive MBA students wanting to get a framework for decision making.
The book has 13 chapters and then a handbook. The handbook is designed to help you take the material learned in the book and apply it to your personal situation. The chapters start by showing you the connection between judgment and leadership. They then provide a framework (a matrix) for "leadership judgment". This process is used heavily throughout the book, so pay attention to this chapter.
Chapters 3 through 6 are key to understanding the personal aspect to leadership and judgment. The authors want you to have a story line that you can not only communicate, but teach to others and in that way lead. The connection between character and courage is explored including where courage becomes foolhardy and takes you off the rails. The two chapters on the importance of people judgment are very important and you should pay close attention to them.
Chapters 7 and 8 focus on judgments regarding strategy while chapters 9 and 10 deal with judgments in times of crisis (and how to prepare for it and how to prevent most of it). Chapter 11 shows the connection between good judgment and continuous learning and chapter 12 talks about teaching leadership. I wasn't particularly wowed by this material.
The concluding chapter is a two page summary of the book and notes that the dimensions in which the complex process of judgment unfolds are time, domain (people, strategy, crisis), and constituencies (being aware of your audience, who is and needs to be involved, and how to interact effectively). Tichy and Bennis also reiterate the four types of knowledge a leader must have to make good judgments: Self-knlowedge. Social Network Knowledge, Organizational Knowledge, and Contextual Knowledge.
The book is full of great examples from real companies and real people. They illustrate the points of the text quite aptly. However, they are the one bone I would pick with the authors. It is easy to intentionally or unintentionally mislead readers with stories of success and say that these successes were the results of this method or demonstrate that our principles work because they worked in these instances. However, the positive connection to them is not proven beyond the sheer number of them. But leaders with good judgment also fail at times because a certain amount of randomness is built into the system.
Jack Welch is quoted as saying that he gets his people decisions right about 80% of the time. OK, I don't want to argue with him about his perceptions, but what exactly does "getting it right" mean? Jeff Immelt is heralded in the book, but recent events show him able to make huge mistakes as well. Does this mean he wasn't prepared to lead? Or that he turned stupid? Or is it that sometimes reality overtakes even the best preparations and plans? You can make your own judgments. However, I would love to see the book where the authors look at current events at the time they are writing the book and make strong and precise PREDICTIONS as the do in analysis of past events. If they can get those right, I will trust their analyses more.
Still, quite a good and useful book.
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
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