Harvard Business Review Everyday Emotional Intelligence

CHAPTER 13

Making Smart Decisions

A summary of the full-length HBR article “Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions” by Andrew Campbell, Jo Whitehead, and Sydney Finkelstein, highlighting key ideas and company examples, and a checklist for putting the idea into action.

Idea in Brief

• Leaders make decisions largely through unconscious processes that neuroscientists call pattern recognition and emotional tagging. These processes usually make for quick, effective decisions, but they can be distorted by self-interest, emotional attachments, or misleading memories.
• Managers need to find systematic ways to recognize the sources of bias—what the authors call “red flag conditions”—and then design safeguards that introduce more analysis, greater debate, ...