Books Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls
Books and Publications Average Rating:

Rating: - A very useful framework for thinking through judgment and leadership
If you are a manager who wants to develop the skills of executive management, this book is for you. The authors provide a methodology that is not simple, but still quite understandable. It would be ideal for a course of MBA or Executive MBA students wanting to get a framework for decision making.

The book has 13 chapters and then a handbook. The handbook is designed to help you take the material learned in the book and apply it to your personal situation. The chapters start by showing you the connection between judgment and leadership. They then provide a framework (a matrix) for "leadership judgment". This process is used heavily throughout the book, so pay attention to this chapter.

Chapters 3 through 6 are key to understanding the personal aspect to leadership and judgment. The authors want you to have a story line that you can not only communicate, but teach to others and in that way lead. The connection between character and courage is explored including where courage becomes foolhardy and takes you off the rails. The two chapters on the importance of people judgment are very important and you should pay close attention to them.

Chapters 7 and 8 focus on judgments regarding strategy while chapters 9 and 10 deal with judgments in times of crisis (and how to prepare for it and how to prevent most of it). Chapter 11 shows the connection between good judgment and continuous learning and chapter 12 talks about teaching leadership. I wasn't particularly wowed by this material.

The concluding chapter is a two page summary of the book and notes that the dimensions in which the complex process of judgment unfolds are time, domain (people, strategy, crisis), and constituencies (being aware of your audience, who is and needs to be involved, and how to interact effectively). Tichy and Bennis also reiterate the four types of knowledge a leader must have to make good judgments: Self-knlowedge. Social Network Knowledge, Organizational Knowledge, and Contextual Knowledge.

The book is full of great examples from real companies and real people. They illustrate the points of the text quite aptly. However, they are the one bone I would pick with the authors. It is easy to intentionally or unintentionally mislead readers with stories of success and say that these successes were the results of this method or demonstrate that our principles work because they worked in these instances. However, the positive connection to them is not proven beyond the sheer number of them. But leaders with good judgment also fail at times because a certain amount of randomness is built into the system.

Jack Welch is quoted as saying that he gets his people decisions right about 80% of the time. OK, I don't want to argue with him about his perceptions, but what exactly does "getting it right" mean? Jeff Immelt is heralded in the book, but recent events show him able to make huge mistakes as well. Does this mean he wasn't prepared to lead? Or that he turned stupid? Or is it that sometimes reality overtakes even the best preparations and plans? You can make your own judgments. However, I would love to see the book where the authors look at current events at the time they are writing the book and make strong and precise PREDICTIONS as the do in analysis of past events. If they can get those right, I will trust their analyses more.

Still, quite a good and useful book.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

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Rating: - Excellent Addition To Recent Business Literature
The audio book CD version of "Judgment" is excellent. Tichey & Bennis offer a thorough and practical framework- framing & naming the issue, making the call, and execution- for considering and making business judgments. Tichey is highly regarded in the field and provided many useful examples from his tenure running GE's famed Crotonville Leadership Center. Unlike some other business books, Tichey & Bennis were not afraid to say when bad judgments and mistakes were made, such as HP's Board's hiring Carly Fiorina along with numerous bad judgments made during Fiorina's tenure as CEO. It's an excellent guide to the judgment process.

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Rating: - This will improve your business decision making
"With good judgment, little else matters. Without it, nothing else matters."

That's one reason why Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis wrote Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls. The other belief is that the study and literature of judgment don't offer much helpful guidance for business leaders.

In thirteen chapters, the authors set out to remedy the lack. They come to the task with two important qualifications. Both are students of the subject and they offer us a blend of research from a variety of disciplines. Both have spent a lot of time "hanging out" with leaders and they bring us the stories of what they've seen.

The first chapter, Judgment and Leadership drives their stakes firmly into the ground. They tell us that making judgment calls is the essential job of a leader.

They also set long term success as the sole measure of good judgment. This is a bit of a problem because several of their examples have only recently gone through their decision process. Jeff Immelt's judgments may be great, for example, but it's too soon to tell if they meet the test of long term success.

This is also the chapter where the authors identify execution as part of the decision process. Most other writers on business decision making take us only up to the point of decision and leave execution as if were foreordained by a good decision.

Other writers see decision making as the work of the leader and execution as the work of his or her subordinates. Making follow-up and follow-through a part of the judgment process makes this book truly valuable.

Because they see the process as including execution and adaptation they avoid the overly rational, straight-line models of other writers. This gives us an understanding of judgment more likely to work in the real world.

The second chapter, Framework for Leadership Judgment, defines judgment as a process, not an event. The process involves recognizing the need for a decision, "naming and framing" the call, and execution and adjustment.

The authors also define the three critical domains where a leader will make decisions. They are people, strategy, and crisis. Effective judgments in people often prevent poor strategy judgments and the need for crisis judgments.

Having a Storyline is a chapter about what the authors call "Teachable Points of View," inevitably shortened to TPOV. We're told to imagine the better future and develop compelling and practical storylines to help others understand the issues and decision.

Chapter 4 is about how a leader must have Character and Courage. That means having clear standards and the strength to maintain those standards in the face of pressure and the challenge of obstacles. They tell us that "Character without courage is meaningless. Courage without good character is dangerous."

With a clear idea of the process and the importance of storylines and character, the authors are ready to start devoting chapters to judgment calls in the three domains. They start with People Judgment Calls because they see them as the platform for good strategic and crisis judgments.

Selecting a CEO is the most important judgment call and we're told that hiring from outside signals a failed process. There are plenty of good and bad examples of CEO Succession processes.

A lot of time is spent on the GE succession processes for both Jack Welch and Jeff Immelt. The authors point out that at GE there are lots of people doing lots of assessments which helps make succession effective throughout the organization. They also note that the board is only involved in the succession process for CEO, adding another level of assessment that includes outsiders.

Chapter 7 is devoted to Strategy Judgments. Strategy judgments constantly evolve and should be made by the CEO, not some corporate planning staff. The authors make a key point that's often overlooked, that the best strategic judgments are a mix of logic and feel, of left brain and right brain.

If you ever wondered where Noel Tichy has spent most of his time, all the references to GE in this book will give you the answer. Chapter 8 is entirely devoted to Jeff Immelt's Strategy Judgments at GE.

There are three key insights in Chapter 9, Crisis Judgments. Bad judgments in people or strategy are a common cause of crises. Leaders need to take personal responsibility for handling crises. And, a common mistake is to lose sight of your overall mission. Once a crisis happens, teamwork and focus make the difference.

Bennis and Tichy suggest that we see Crisis as a Leadership Development Opportunity in chapter 10. The basic points they make in this chapter are good ones. You should prepare in advance for crises because when they happen it's too late for thoughtful decision-making. And the crisis can provide you with a wonderful opportunity to use meeting the challenge as a form of leadership development.

This chapter also illustrates a weakness in the book. The authors were involved in many of the processes they describe. That's good. It gives them first hand experience.

The problem is that it leads them to write about situations that simply haven't played out enough to meet their test for long term success. Jeff Immelt's strategic judgments are one example. Another is Circuit City which gets lots of ink in this chapter.

Circuit City also illustrates the willingness of the authors to take what client top management tells them at face value. How else to describe the way they deal with Circuit City's layoffs of their top sales staff in the stores to replace them with less expensive (and less knowledgeable) people.

The authors tell us "The judgment to make cuts was good. The PR was not so good." In reality more than the PR was not so good.

The layoffs were ham-handed at best. They removed knowledgeable sales staff from the stores, resulting in far lower add-on business.

The way things were handled was also completely at odds with the CEO's TPOV that "what is good for associates is also what helps customers." In fact, Circuit City fired the very associates who could help customers the most and replaced them with low-wage "tag readers."

Chapter 11 builds on the Knowledge Creation theme. There are three key points. Leaders should critique their own performance. Knowledge creation for all levels should be an explicit goal. And frontline employees are the new knowledge workers. The authors identify four kinds of knowledge that leaders need to make effective judgments: self-knowledge, social network knowledge, organizational knowledge, and contextual knowledge.

Then we come to chapter 12 which is the story of the New York City Leadership Academy. On the one hand, this is a good, comprehensive case that is well rendered. But it's also a very different leadership situation for everything else in the book. A comprehensive business case would have been better. So would eliminating this chapter entirely.

After a short (2 page) Conclusion, the book is filled out with a Handbook for Leadership Judgment. It covers the same ground as the main book, but with lots of questions and charts. It's a good addition because it gives you a way to consolidate personal lessons.

This is a superbly-written business book by two experts in the field who share both research and excellent teaching stories. Their core insight (that execution is part of judgment) is powerful and different from other business authors. Their simple process will be usable by all business leaders.

If you are in business and make decisions, you should read this book.

Here's a quick summary of my thoughts.

How this book is different:

The authors write about a process of judgment that includes preparation (including naming and framing the issue), the decision, and execution and adaptation. This is virtually unique among writers on business judgment, most of whom treat decision as something the leader does and execution as something followers do.

This process is much more real world than I've seen elsewhere. Unlike overly rational models, it stresses the need for both logic and "feel." Unlike straight-line, one-time-through models it includes adaptation and re-do loops.

This is a comprehensive approach. The authors see the process in time as one dimension of judgment. Others are domains (people, strategy, and crisis), and constituencies. They also say that a leader needs four kinds of knowledge to be effective: self-knowledge, social network knowledge, organizational knowledge, and contextual knowledge.

Strengths:

A simple, yet sophisticated and easy to understand and implement process for making judgment calls. It identifies long term success as the sole measure of good judgment. You can use this process in any kind of organization.

Excellent writing that combines research from a number of fields with good storytelling. The stories are long enough to make several points. They include stories where things didn't work right the first time.

A "Handbook for Leadership Judgment" that follows the main book and gives you a way to apply the insights in your own situation.

There are excellent descriptions of workshop and learning processes that you can take and modify to suit.

Warnings:

The authors write mostly about organizations that they've been involved with and that leads to two problems. They include judgments that haven't met their own test of long term success. And, they've often drunk their own Kool-Aid and present things as seen from the executive suite and not from either the front line or the outside.

There's a lot of GE here because Tichy's been involved with GE since the 60s. Sometimes that means he settles for an easy to find GE example instead of digging out a better example from elsewhere.

There's no discussion of how a CEO gets information or sorts wheat from chaff. Those are important parts of decision making.

This book, like too many others, is written as if the reader is a big company CEO. While the points are all good, the perspective means you will have to do some adapting.

Bottom Line:

This is a must-read for business leaders.

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Rating: - They'll Remember Your Best or Worst Judgment Call
Here's an important book on judgment and decision-making--and how leaders focus on the consequential. The authors write, "Jack Welch used to say at GE that if he wasn't careful with his time, he could spend days at the company's headquarters knee deep in bureaucratic crap and add no value to the company."

Another customer reviewer here nailed the importance of this book. He called it a "gem among a sea of brain-dead business books." I agree on both counts. When Warren Bennis speaks, people listen. Normally, hot books create their own buzz, but my circles are not talking about this one yet. It's a weighty topic (392 pages) and a slim-jim novelette wouldn't do it justice.

Judgment, preach the authors, is "the essence of effective leadership." It involves three domains: people, strategy and crisis. Interestingly, those are three of my 20 management buckets: the People Bucket, the Strategy Bucket and the Crisis Bucket in my book, Mastering The Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Non-profit. They call judgment the proverbial elephant on the table--because it's rarely addressed. "Without a deeper and more compelling understanding of how leaders exercise judgment, the study of leadership can never be complete," they write.

"Take any leader, a U.S. president, a Fortune 500 CEO, a big league coach, wartime general, you name it. Chances are you remember them for their best or worst judgment call." Examples: Harry Truman (atom bomb), Nixon (Watergate), Bill Clinton (Monica), Coca-Cola's Robert Goizueta (New Coke), and Carly Fiorina ("for destroying HP's redoubtable culture").

The stories and anecdotes are rich, sometimes page-turning (wow--they do not like Fiorina). The 100-page "Handbook for Leadership Judgment" is a model for what's missing from other brain-dead business books. Buy it. Read it. Study it. You'll enhance your judgment and decision-making. Guaranteed.