The Complete Problem Solver: A Total System for Competitive Decision Making

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Summary: Committees For Dummies
Review: When an ex-cop writes a book, it's usually all about his exploits. When a retiring management consultant writes a book, it's usually his working theory as gospel. This one purports to offer a system of decision making for large corporations. The language is shrouded in inept metaphors and the stuff related to methodology fills maybe 20 pages. The rest of the 230pp is filled with overformalized examples of application of his methods, some of them ludicrous as selectng a gift for a person's birthday using his decision making process. The man probably consulted for 30 years as he claims, but if his work involved any expertise or experience,he does not reveal any of it in this book. Basically he presents Scientific Method and Research Objectivity applies to Management committe work. Part one deals with conducting objective inquiries by executive teams, part two introduces criterion based option analysis and part three deals with risk assessment at the very rudimentary levels. The book requires no number crunching or statistical knowledge on part fo the reader for weighing options or ranking them. It might be worthwhile reading for the intro level management course, but the book is useless since it contains nothing new for any manager or executive with any degree of familiarity with operations research or brainstorming. The worst part of it is that he is not sharing any real experience acquired from facilitating research and consensus building with the high level executive committee planning that he must have worked with as his examples would lead us to believe; It is a terrifying thought that the upper corporate governing structure would be as ignorant and insular as simplicity of his method, assumption of total ignorance of basic research methodology on part of the executive reading this book, and the oversimplification of some of his examples seems to indicate. Almost ignored by the author is any discussion of politics, human factors and group dynamics that interfere with objective decision making and often influence large organisations to pursue less than adequate and self distructive policies.