HBR Guide to Emotional Intelligence (HBR Guide Series)

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 bias.
• 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, or stronger governance. The authors identify three of these ...