Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most

Good survey of decision making strategies, albeit a little too larded with examples for my tastes. I particularly valued the discussion of heterogeneous v. homogeneous group decision making, a critical variable to manage when moving to more diverse teams. Briefly, less diverse teams reach consensus / make decisions far more quickly and comfortably than more diverse teams, but more diverse teams will tend to come to much better decisions. To achieve the latter, we need to acknowledge and manage the former.

Pretty well done, and helpful to me as I struggle with my own indecisiveness around long-term decisions. Loses the thread a bit at the end, although I appreciate the humanistic approach he outlined.

This book was recommended by Fareed Zakaria and I saw the author interviewed on that show. The book is interesting as it gets into the decision making process for big decisions that may have long term consequences. He deals with the usual involvement of data, pros and cons, length of time, predictability, etc. He does bring in the use of literary novels for decisions that are not cut and dry. Because we don't have data on how people react to big decisions, Johnson says that literary novels and the myriad of scenarios that they depict can give us information that will help us in our life decisions. This was not a long read but it also didn't come up with real clear processes for decision making that I hadn't considered. He does use the show more capture of Osama Bin-Laden as a constant example of the decision making process which I found interesting. show less

I don't really have any takeaways from this book -- nothing that improves my decision making, at any rate. It benefits from using, for the most part, current examples of the process. It ties in literary novels as a part of the process that I'll have to consider a bit more.

NF