Making a good decision is a skill&;amp;-one that can be learned, honed, and perfected. Now, approach the important decisions in your life with a more seasoned, educated eye. The Art of Critical Decision Making explores how individuals, groups, and organizations make effective choices. These 24 fascinating lectures also provide you with the skills and techniques you need to enhance the effectiveness of your own decision making. Taught by Professor Michael A. Roberto&;amp;-a scholar of managerial decision making&;amp;-this course is an engaging and practical guide to one of the most fundamental activities in your everyday life.
The Art of Critical Decision Making
Master the skill of decision making with this engaging and practical guide taught by an award-winning scholar of leadership, decision making, and business strategy.
Rated 1 out of
5
by
Gerald from Hong Kong from
Enslaved by the phony "Network Security" companies
I am a consumer from Hong Kong. I cannot see the introductory marketing video for this course. More and more media have been barring from Hong Kong IP addresses. This is the work of the so-called "Network Security" companies. They don't really do anything that takes real work or real intelligence. They just blanket-block IP addresses from regions that are bad-mouthed by the SELFISH Politicians; Politicians who lie to voters and increase their prejudice and increase their ignorance, so they can get re-elected. It is sad that you empoly the services of "Network Security" companies that only have their own interest at heart, and deliver NO real service. A low IQ monkey can do that job. Hope you are not paying a lot for it. You should actually be compensated for the loss sales, and the idiotic image portraited by your "Network Security" company.
Date published: 2023-09-06
Rated 5 out of
5
by
yankee sue from
What an Interesting Course
When I bought this course I thought it would be about logic. It was so much more. I read the news and find that I probe the details and see them in a different light, for example the disaster of the submersible. Details about patterns of behavior, habits in making choices jumped out at me and I saw the importance of details that would have slipped by before. This is applicable way beyond the business arena.
Thank you for educating me.
Date published: 2023-07-15
Rated 5 out of
5
by
JohnnyMac from
Great course. Just one quibble.
I like everything about this course. One thing that jumped out at me was the hypothetical example in Part 4 that talked about an "Asian disease" that would kill 600 people. Why make it an "Asian" disease? How about just calling it a "worldwide pandemic?" I am sure I am not the only one to make this comment now in our post-Covid world. Keep up the great work!!!
Date published: 2022-08-02
Rated 5 out of
5
by
Bandit 46 from
Thought Provoking Course
Dr. Roberto's course is exceptional, very thought provoking learning experience. I highly recommend this course for leaders in almost all industries. It is a primer on the essentail task of leadership-that being making decisions in a time sensitive, no defect environment.
Date published: 2022-05-25
Rated 5 out of
5
by
Joebag from
Great Course
This is a great course. I think his lecture on connecting the dots was a departure from otherwise a great course. The connecting the dots was bordering on a coverup for George W and Condi. Almost every lecture he stressed leadership and accountability. But when it comes to W. and Condi he covers their tracks. He said he poured over the 911 report but only quoted the Republicans report. Why does he want sacrifice his integrity for Condi one of the most incompetent public servants in history? Weird. Why stop your critique with FBI and CIA leadership. Other lectures he didn't pull any punches. An FBI official told W. the terrorists were planning an attack and W. said (essentially) beat it kid.
Date published: 2022-03-31
Rated 5 out of
5
by
Lcccp from
Applicable to everyday work situations.
I found this material to be very useful day to day in the office and when dealing with customers in the field. The foundations taught about deciding has proven to be extremely useful when reviewing customer conceptions of issues, either to affirm or guide them in a reassessment.
Date published: 2022-01-07
Rated 5 out of
5
by
Anonymous from
Engaging and challenging
I am in my last year of training as a maternity care professional and took this course as part one of my requirements. Professor Roberto uses real world examples that are salient to any profession. The course challenged me to think differently about decision making. I now feel more equipped to lead my team and make better, safer choices with my clients. Thank you Professor Roberto!
Date published: 2020-11-06
Rated 5 out of
5
by
Scooter7918 from
Exceptional overview
Having led large, complex organizations for the past 39 years I found many aspects of this broad overview examining how organizations, across multiple levels, make or fail to make optimal decisions. Knowing the traps, setting the tone and environmental factors, deciding how to decide are all essential leadership tools.
Date published: 2020-04-03
Overview
About
Dr. Michael A. Roberto teaches leadership, managerial decision making, and business strategy as the Trustee Professor of Management at Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island. He joined the faculty at Bryant University after teaching at Harvard Business School for six years. Previously, Professor Roberto was a Visiting Associate Professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. Professor Roberto earned an M.B.A. with High Distinction and a D.B.A. from Harvard Business School. He brings real-world business skills to the classroom from his years of consulting at and teaching in the leadership development programs of a number of firms, including Apple, Walmart, Morgan Stanley, Coca-Cola, Federal Express, and Johnson & Johnson. Recognized for his research, writing, and teaching, Professor Roberto has earned several coveted teaching awards, including the Outstanding M.B.A. Teaching Award from Bryant University and Harvard University's Allyn A. Young Prize for Teaching in Economics. Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer, his book about cultivating constructive debate to help leaders make better decisions, was named one of the top 10 business books of 2005 by The Globe and Mail. His most recent book is Know What You Don't Know: How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen.
Professor Roberto participated in The Great Courses Professor Chat series. Read the chat to learn more about business strategy, decision-making, and leadership.
Trailer
01: Making High-Stakes Decisions
Examine the myth that bad decisions are most often made by bad leaders. Professor Roberto uses the examples of the Challenger disaster, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and Daimler's acquisition of Chrysler to uncover why good leaders can make bad decisions if the decision-making process they use is flawed.
32 min
02: Cognitive Biases
Using the story of the tragedies on Mount Everest in 1996, Professor Roberto introduces you to three cognitive biases that play a role in bad decision making: sunk-cost effect, overconfidence bias, and recency effect.
30 min
03: Avoiding Decision-Making Traps
Explore more decision-making traps you can fall into if you're not aware of them, such as confirmatory bias, anchoring bias, attribution error, illusory correlation, hindsight bias, and egocentrism. Darwin avoided confirmatory bias by keeping a separate record of observations that contradicted his theory of evolution.
31 min
04: Framing-Risk or Opportunity?
The way you or others frame a problem or decision can have a significant impact on the choices you make. Understand why framing a decision in terms of what you have to lose causes you to take more risks.
31 min
05: Intuition-Recognizing Patterns
Discover how to use intuition as a powerful tool in decision making when combined with rational analysis and acknowledge the cognitive processes that are part of our intuition. Professor Roberto recounts case studies from firefighting, health care, and the video game industry to explain the potential and pitfalls of intuition.
32 min
06: Reasoning by Analogy
Learn how the Korean War differed from the threat of Adolf Hitler. Professor Roberto explains reasoning by analogy and how you can use analogies to make sense of a complex problem. At the same time, we must avoid the common tendency to overstate the similarities of one situation to another and overlook key differences.
32 min
07: Making Sense of Ambiguous Situations
We might like to think that we carefully examine our choices before we make a decision. However, we often do the reverse-make a decision and then figure out why, and base future decisions on how we made sense of other decisions. This process, called sense-making by Karl Weick, constantly influences our behavior.
29 min
08: The Wisdom of Crowds?
This lecture includes examples from game shows such as Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and from the business world that demonstrate the usefulness of decision making by groups and the potential problems if group members are not fully engaged....
32 min
09: Groupthink-Thinking or Conforming?
Discover why even diverse groups can make bad decisions if members are not able to express divergent opinions. This lecture focuses on how groupthink led to the Bay of Pigs invasion.
31 min
10: Deciding How to Decide
After the Bay of Pigs failure, President Kennedy and his advisors reflected on their mistakes and created a new process for group discussion and decision making to prevent future groupthink and promote diverse perspectives. Here, Professor Roberto introduces the concept of developing a decision-making process.
30 min
11: Stimulating Conflict and Debate
Learn how constructive conflict can lead to new insights and stronger decisions. Discover four methods to stimulate useful debate: role plays, mental simulation techniques, creating a point-counterpoint dynamic, and applying diverse conceptual models and frameworks.
30 min
12: Keeping Conflict Constructive
Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for conflict to become unproductive. Understand how to look for and eliminate dysfunctional conflict to cultivate effective teams. This lecture includes cases on Sid Caesar's comedy writing team, health care, and the nonprofit sector.
31 min
13: Creativity and Brainstorming
IDEO is one of the world's leading product design firms, expert in developing creative and innovative products for many industries. What makes their process so effective? To help you understand their formula at work, Professor Roberto describes an experiment in which IDEO staff worked to design a new product in just one week.
32 min
14: The Curious Inability to Decide
Often as individuals or in groups we become paralyzed by indecision-unable to commit to one path or another. This lecture examines three modes of indecision in groups: "the culture of yes, the culture of no, and the culture of maybe."
30 min
15: Procedural Justice
Using case studies about Daimler Chrysler and an aerospace and defense firm, Professor Roberto explains the challenge of building consensus among team members once a decision has been made so everyone will work together to implement it.
31 min
16: Achieving Closure through Small Wins
To move forward through the brainstorming and decision-making processes, groups must find intermediate moments of agreement that Karl Weick calls "small wins." This lecture looks at how teams achieve closure through small wins, using cases about D-Day, Social Security, and the CEO of Corning.
31 min
17: Normal Accident Theory
Discover how organizational culture and structure affect decision making by individuals and groups. Learn about the Three Mile Island accident to understand what went wrong in that system, and understand how catastrophes more often stem from a domino chain of bad decisions rather than one wrong choice.
30 min
18: Normalizing Deviance
The tragic explosion of the Challenger space shuttle was likely the result of a flawed culture at NASA. The repeated and increased tolerance of questionable data and decisions ultimately led to a large-scale failure. How can leaders reform such cultures?
31 min
19: Allison's Model-Three Lenses
Learn Graham Allison's approach to examine decision making through three lenses. Use Allison's model to explore the Cuban Missile Crisis from the individual and cognitive perspective, the group dynamics view, and the vantage point of organizational politics and bargaining.
31 min
20: Practical Drift
Uncover why organizations make decisions that contradict their own rules and regulations. The concept of practical drift explains this phenomenon, as you see by studying a military friendly-fire case from 1994.
31 min
21: Ambiguous Threats and the Recovery Window
When a threat is ambiguous, organizations are likely to minimize the possible risks. Look again at NASA but this time at the Columbia space shuttle accident, 17 years after the Challenger explosion, to understand how conditions changed or stayed the same in that culture.
32 min
22: Connecting the Dots
Often in large organizations, no one individual can see or understand all the elements at the same time. Great organizations integrate various pieces to see the big picture. Discover how failure to connect the dots led to an inability to recognize the extent of the threat of a terrorist attack on American soil and therefore a lack of appropriate action before September 11.
30 min
23: Seeking Out Problems
Explore how complex, high-risk organizations succeed by focusing on the possibility of failure. Leaders at these organizations proactively look for problems rather than ignore red flags. Also, learn how Toyota's application of these principles has contributed to its success.
30 min
24: Asking the Right Questions
Examine the trend of leaders moving from making decisions themselves to focusing on how decisions are made by everyone in their organizations. Smart leaders, as you discover, ask the right questions to glean the collective wisdom of their colleagues and staffs.
30 min
