Part one: What did you like about the (topic)? What struck you as interesting? Why did the (topic) stimulate positive emotion?
The thing I liked about the book is the way the author tries to avoid conflicts in organizations through encouraging negotiations and perfect decision making processes. In addition, the book enables leaders to improve their judgment and decision making abilities. Perfect decision making processes enables people to organize various activities and avoid conflicts.
The most fascinating thing from the book is the way the author analysis people’s behavior and ranks them according to their outcomes. The book provides a step-by-step description of how readers should go about making judgments in various leadership positions. In addition, the author provides the common biases that affect today’s leaders that should be considered when making life time decisions (Bazerman, 2006).
The topic has a positive stimulation through providing ways and means of avoiding conflicts in the societies we live in. Moreover, the author provides and analysis of how decision making process should be done in a fair and ethical manner considering people’s cultural background. The book plays a significant role in assisting anyone willing to improve on their judgment, or decision making.
Part Two: What did you not like about the (topic)? Why did the (topic) stimulate negative emotion?
The topic fails to provide a concise discussion on the decision making process. Due to the current environment, and the complex dynamics in the leadership Bazerman limits his discussions only on few selected issues that are believed to have a significant impact to readers. The issue of multiparty decision making process has limited the author’s researches, making him concentrate more on individual decision making process. Moreover, Bazerman provides limited examples that fail to satisfy the reader because some do not involve real live situations. On the other hand, the author provides motivational and emotional influences on decision making but fails to indicate the situations when these factors should be used at what situations. The reader gets suspicious on what would be the consequences of certain decisions since the author leaves some examples hanging.
The topic stimulates negative emotions because as a reader one is afraid of making a certain decision that would lead to conflicts between people. The author gives a survey on how to understand other’s biases, but there are no recommendations about how to make people get rid of the biases. Second, Bazerman (2006) argues that managers should reward employees for a good decision and not results of the solution. This encourages slowness in the organization because people would concentrate more on decision making and forget about their personal duties.
Part Three: What did you learn? Summarize your major take-away and intellectual sound bites.
The book gives several lessons to the reader. First, the readers get to know the steps of making a good decision depending on the type of situation faced. Bazerman believes that people are influenced by their own biases when it comes to making careful judgments. The book tries to discourage such biases and overcome it. Second, the book encourages investment since it gives a recommendation on how to avoid making wrong investments. The author focuses on the psychology of poor investment decision making and provides actions towards the issue. Finally, the use of decision-analysis tool is of great importance to organizations faced with decision making process. The tool provides the best approach towards any decisions planned in an organization.
Bottom Line: A one sentence wham-bang thank-you-ma'am synopsis of what you will take away from the lesson regarding what you learned.
In all situations requiring keen judgment, people’s biasness plays a significant role in influencing the type of decision made.
References
Bazerman, M. H. (2006). Judgment in managerial decision making (6th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: J. Wiley.
