Praise for Decision Quality

"No one has coached more businesses through high-stakes strategic decisions than Carl Spetzler and the team at SDG. If you're looking for wisdom on making better decisions in your business, you've come to the right place."

-Chip and Dan Heath, Bestselling Coauthors including Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

"I've been a fan of the decision quality approach for many years. I try to share it with analysts and engineers with whom I work because we are often drawn toward solving analytically complex problems without enough attention to framing problems well, managing uncertainty, and engaging with organizations from start to finish. The decision quality framework is an excellent guide for consultants, technical experts, and program managers to achieve the most impact from their work."

-Thomas Olavson, PhD, Google Inc.

"Implementing the decision quality processes described in this book should become the 'new normal' for all organizations and their leaders. Complex or not, decision making at the product, service, or human capital level involves dealing with uncertainty and re-examining assumptions. This book provides the perfect framework for doing this mission-critical work-and making the best choices possible for building work environments and corporate cultures for top performance and innovation."

-China Gorman, Former CEO, Great Place to Work Institute

"From beginning to end, this book underscores the business benefits that accrue from investing in decision quality processes. The authors offer actionable steps that leaders can take to check biases rooted in deeply held beliefs and steer their organizations toward better value creation."

-Philip E. Tetlock, PhD, Bestselling Author including Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

"Making the right decisions is critical to the success of every organization. The framework as presented in this book by Carl Spetzler and his colleagues puts rigor and quality into the very difficult and seemingly complex decisions that we have to make as business leaders. Applying it has served me well throughout my career, sometimes resulting in counterintuitive outcomes. For me this is a clear 'must read' for everyone in a leadership position."

-Gerard Kleisterlee, Chairman, Vodafone Group Plc

"True decision quality is highly elusive, yet its impact on an organization is enormous. In this book, the authors deliver an approach and philosophy that can provide an immediate and positive impact on personal and business decisions. Books that achieve this in such a readable format are rare indeed. Acquiring a copy could be the first in a series of quality decisions!"

-Andrew Evans, MBA, Unilever; Fellow, Society of Decision Professionals

"A very savvy, sorely needed systematic approach to making uncertainty an integral dimension of the questions we ask and the answers we seek. Their strategy shows you how to judge the quality of your decisions without knowing or relying on outcomes that may or may not be a reflection of the actual decision process."

-Robert A. Burton, MD, Bestselling Author including On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not

"Carl Spetzler has been working on how to improve business decision quality for half a century. Everyone who wants to make better business decisions would benefit by learning the lessons in this book."

-Ronald A. Howard, ScD, Professor, Stanford University School of Engineering

"Decision quality is one of the most chronically overlooked sources of value in industry today. This book describes a set of principles and techniques that companies and individuals alike can use to improve the quality of their decisions and, ultimately, grow their bottom line. It is a practical and valuable guide for anyone seeking to improve their own or their organization's decision making."

-Joe Melvin, MBA, Genentech, Inc.

"Decision Quality takes us back to the beginning. After decades of focus on 'execution,' this book offers a practical and vivid primer on starting from the right decisions in the first place."

-Richard Whittington, PhD, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

"Simply put, this book provides with great clarity a framework for decision-making quality that unquestionably works. We adopted this framework at NCI Building Systems, Inc. because it encourages our collaborative culture, helps us create value, and helps us avoid mistakes."

-Norman C. Chambers, Chairman, President and CEO, NCI Building Systems, Inc.

"The authors have done a masterful job explaining the essence of decision quality in a book that is a 'must read' for everybody. They have compiled their life-long experience of personal and professional decisions to help readers recognize that decisions can be improved and that decision quality creates value."

-Ali E. Abbas, PhD, USC; Director, Center for Interdisciplinary Decisions and Ethics (DECIDE)

"This book illustrates the plethora of positive professional and personal results possible when implementing decision quality processes. Most important, it does this by paying close attention and respect to the multiple dimensions associated with decision making-in particular, to biases often resulting from various cultural and emotional beliefs. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to see improvement in their decision-making skills."

-Paul Slovic, PhD, University of Oregon; President, Decision Research

"I've successfully applied the SDG decision quality process in complex energy-sector situations over the past 20 years, optimizing outcomes and creating value measured in billions of dollars. The SDG decision quality process works."

-Harold "Hal" N. Kvisle, MBA; Former CEO (Retired), TransCanada Corporation; Former CEO (Retired), Talisman Energy Inc.

"My patient support program has used the decision quality principles outlined in this book to guide thousands of patients through life-and-death decisions. Extensive research studies, including randomized controlled trials, have shown the benefits to patients. Compared to usual care, patients who use these techniques become more informed and involved in their decisions, and have better outcomes. I have also used decision quality as a leader to manage my team. It's a cognitive framework that you can use at organizational as well as interpersonal and individual levels. No one has done more to advance the field of decision quality than Carl Spetzler and his colleagues at SDG. Decision quality is the next frontier in the quality movement. Read this book to stake your claim on the future."

-Jeff Belkora, PhD, Associate Professor of Surgery and Health Policy, UCSF

"It's my absolute pleasure to recommend this book, as I know firsthand DQ works-and this book is the ultimate DQ reference, written by the leaders in the field."

-Ibrahim Almojel, PhD, Saudi Aramco Investment Management Company

"This book will have a prominent position on my library shelf. Nothing is more important in business management and leadership than being a champion of decision quality. Transformative leaders make decisions that encompass both their gut feelings and whatever empirical evidence is available. This text is right on cue. The best decision for you right now, is to make the decision to buy this book, learn from it, and turn it into valuable action for you and your organization."

-Nick Bontis, PhD, McMaster University; Director, Center for Intellectual Capital Research

"One of the challenges for any leader is to create an environment where quality decisions are made on a consistent basis. This book is for all of us who want to assemble the building blocks of decision quality and decision making in our organizations. In my opinion, it should be required reading for those of us who work in complex environments where a clear guide to the discipline of generating decision quality is an imperative."

-Jim Wiggett, CEO, Bebe Stores, Inc.; Former CEO, Sephora.com

"At Chevron, during my tenure, we adopted DQ for all major decisions-for the simple reason that it works. A lot of the benefit comes from better framing discussions at the front end of decision making."

-David J. O'Reilly, Former Chairman and CEO, Chevron Corporation

"I have a lot of respect for SDG as an organization-and even more so now, knowing this book was authored by three members of the SDG team. It offers a simple yet comprehensive decision-making framework, and explains in practical terms why, for example, a human resources specialist might see a particular organizational problem as a people issue, yet an engineer might see the same problem as a series of technology issues. Most important, the book shows how to grow and bridge decision quality across functional units-something organizations need to know for competitive advantage."

-Debra Engel, MS, Board Member, Institute for the Future; Senior Executive Advisor to Silicon Valley Emerging Growth Organizations

"We are all susceptible to the traps and...