Decision Analysis for Management Judgment, 6th Edition

Foreword to First Edition

It is a curious fact that although ability to take decisions is at the top of most senior executives’ list of attributes for success in management, those same people are usually unwilling to spend any time developing this quality. Perhaps decision-making is considered as fundamental as breathing: essential for life, a natural and automatic process. Therefore, why study it?

In this book, Paul Goodwin and George Wright show why: because research over the past 40 years has revealed numerous ways in which the process of making decisions goes wrong, usually without our knowing it. But the main thrust of this book is to show how decision analysis can be applied so that decisions are made correctly. The beauty of the book lies in providing numerous decision-analysis techniques in a form that makes them usable by busy managers and administrators.

Ever since decision theory was introduced in 1960 by Howard Raiffa and Robert Schlaifer of Harvard University’s Business School, a succession of textbooks has chronicled the development of this abstract mathematical discipline to a potentially useful technology, known as decision analysis, through to numerous successful applications in commerce, industry, government, the military, and medicine. But all these books have been either inaccessible to managers and administrators or restricted to only a narrow conception of decision analysis, such as decision trees.

Unusually, this book does not even start with decision ...