Management expert Paul C. Nutt provides in-depth guidance for making tough decisions, that is, high-stake decisions surrounded by conflict and uncertainty. Nutt details methods that help managers avoid the bias and habitual behavior that lead to poor decision making—and presents examples from public, private, and nonprofit organizations that show how to tailor these methods to different situations. He offers tools for managers to objectively evaluate their own decision making, enabling them to identify areas for improvement.

People fear a decision that can turn into a debacle - a decision riddled with poor practices producing big losses that become public. This book reveals how a decision can turn into a fiasco and how to prevent this from happening....

Winner of the 1994 Best Book Award presented by the Public and Nonprofit Sector Division of the Academy of ManagementThis handbook goes beyond strategic planning to show how an organization can be managed strategically. Comprehensive in scope, it provides an innovative framework for understanding strategic issues in the public and nonprofit sectors, explains strategic management concepts and describes the process step by step, details support techniques, discusses specific case examples, and includes useful forms and worksheets.

[This book] analyzes ... the chains of blunders and bad judgments that led to fifteen legendary debacles, including the Firestone tire recall, EuroDisney, and Quaker's failed acquisition of Snapple. In each case, [the author] pinpoints exactly how and where the decision-making process went wrong and shows what managers in any organization can learn from these monumental fiascoes. Based on his analysis of 400 strategic decisions made by top managers in areas such as products and services, pricing and markets, personnel policy, technology acquisition, and strategic reorganization, [the author] estimates that two-thirds of all decisions are based on failure-prone or questionable tactics. He uses the fifteen monumental decision-making disasters to illustrate the potential consequences of these common tactical errors and traps ... He then details successful alternative approaches to decision-making.-Back cover.

People fear a decision that can turn into a debacle - a decision riddled with poor practices producing big losses that become public. This book reveals how a decision can turn into a fiasco and how to prevent this from happening.