Think Again: Why Good Leaders
Make Bad Decisions and How to
Keep it From Happening to You by
Andrew Campbell
It Does Get You To Think Again!
Why do smart and experienced leaders make flawed, even catastrophic,
decisions? Why do people keep believing they have made the right choice,
even with the disastrous result staring them in the face? And how can you
be sure youre making the right decision--without the benefit of hindsight?
Sydney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead, and Andrew Campbell show how the
usually beneficial processes of the human mind can become traps when
we face big decisions. The authors show how the shortcuts our brains
have learned to take over millennia of evolution can derail our decision

making. Think Again offers a powerful model for making better decisions,
describing the key red flags to watch for and detailing the decision-making
safeguards we need.
Using examples from business, politics, and history, Think Again
deconstructs bad decisions, as they unfolded in real time, to show how you
can avoid the same fate.
Personal Review: Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad
Decisions and How to Keep it From Happening to You by
Andrew Campbell
In a previous book published in 2004, Sydney Finkelstein explains why
smart executives fail and what we can learn from their mistakes. In Think
Again, he and his co-authors, Jo Whitehead and Andrew Campbell,
investigate this subject in much greater depth. They "traveled to the heart
of decision making in organizations of all shapes and sizes throughout the
world" and began to assemble a database of decisions that went wrong,
"decisions in which any clearheaded analysis at the time would have
concluded that it was the wrong decision." They realized that at least some
decisions based on considered thinking can turn out badly because of
unforeseen risks. Also, "Sometimes people are just unlucky." With
considerable difficulty, they differentiated between flawed decisions and
calculated risks that turned out badly. What did they learn? "The answers
were "simpler and more powerful than we were expected. Two factors are
at play in a flawed decision: an individual or group of individuals who have
made an error of judgment, and a decision process that fails to correct the
error. Both have to be present to produce a bad decision. This is an
important realization." Indeed it is. There are others throughout the
authors' narrative.
First, they focus their research on how brains make decisions. They
explain how the brain "has been wonderfully designed for decision making
- but also how it can be tricked into false judgments." (Part One, Chapters
One-Four, Pages 3-71). Next, they examine the four conditions under
which flawed thinking is most likely to happen. "We call these [begin italics]
red flag conditions [end italics] because they provide a warning that when
these conditions exist, even an experienced decision maker can get it
wrong." (Part Two, Chapters Five-Eight), Pages 75-153). Then in Part
Three (Chapters Nine-Eleven, Pages 157-204), they suggest which
"special steps" must be taken to ensure that a decision does not go "off the
rails." When there are red flag conditions, they recommend four types of
external "safeguards," each of which can help an individual to "strengthen
the decision process, so that the distorted thinking is diluted or
challenged." Readers will also appreciate the provision of two appendices:
a database of cases and a database of safeguards. The authors also
extend an invitation to visit two Web sites,

www.tuck.dartmouth.edu/thinkagain and www.thinkagain-book.com, for
additional advice, ideas, and resources.
It is important to keep in mind, of course, that there are limits to the extent
that safeguards can defend against the risk of error. For example, one or
more of them may not be fully understood and/or improperly established
and/or ineffectively applied. The same is true of red flags. There must be a
comprehensive and active system in place throughout the organization that
will elevate them whenever flawed thinking is about to produce a bad
decision. In many organizations, governance processes and rules in place
and rigorously maintained can cause other problems. "Each major blunder
leads to additional processes and rules that are applied to all major
decisions. The result is a bureaucracy that is costly, time consuming, and
demotivating. Most importantly, managers start to lose respect for the
system and seek ways of circumventing the processes." The safeguards
framework described in this book will be effective only if and when there is
a culture of candor, one in which everyone is not only encouraged but
required to express principled dissent, especially when doing so "speaks to
power." Dante had excellent reasons for reserving the last and worst ring
in hell for those who, in a moral crisis, preserve their neutrality.
I commend Sydney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead, and Andrew Campbell on
their rigorous and thorough coverage of a major challenge that decision-
makers in all organizations face each day: What are the right questions to
ask, what is the best answer to each, and how can I verify that? Even then,
it is not possible to eliminate all the risks. "Even armed with our safeguards
framework, leaders will still make mistakes - but it possible to improve the
odds."
Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out
Finkelstein's aforementioned Why Smart Executives Fail: And What You
Can Learn from Their Mistakes and Judgment: How Winning Leaders
Make Great Calls co-authored by Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis as well as
Torkel Klingberg's The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the
Limits of Working Memory, Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide, Joseph
Hallinan's Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget
Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average,
and Phil Rosenzweig's The Halo Effect: ...and the Eight Other Business
Delusions That Deceive Managers.
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