Heads, You Win!: How the Best Companies Think--And How You Can Use Their Examples to Develop Critical Thinking Within Your Own Organization

By Ron Evans and Quinn Spitzer

Book Overview

New Coke. The Walt Disney Company's aborted theme park near the Manassas battlefield. AT&T's acquisition of NCR Corp. Were these merely the gaffes of individual decision makers, or do they represent larger, organizational deficiencies in critical thinking?
How confident are you in the collective brainpower of your organization?
The most crucial task facing any business leader in today's brutally competitive economy is to sharpen his or her organization's ability to effectively solve problems, make decisions, and cut through the information clutter. In Heads, You Win , Kepner-Tregoe's CEO, Quinn Spitzer, and executive Ron Evans cite the experiences and share the advice of the presidents and CEOs of some of the world's most innovative companies -- organizations like Johnson & Johnson, Chrysler Corporation, British Airways, and Harley-Davidson, Inc. -- that are successful because they capitalize on the brainpower of every employee.
Filled with practical tips and techniques, and lightened with amusing, real-life anecdotes, Heads, You Win is an indispensable tool for sorting through the complexities of running a business today and identifying the essential skills that determine a company's success.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684838753
• ISBN13: 9780684838755
• Release Date: February 1999
• Publisher: Touchstone Books
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Very useful in improving quality of decision making

I pride myself on my decision making / problem solving / analysis skills. Others have told me that I'm good at identifying the most important issues out of lots of data / information / (often contradictory) evidence. So, I got the book for a quick skim and to fill "gaps". The first few chapters didn't add much value. However, the last 2/3 of the book outlined a fairly simple and straight-forward decision making process. I have found this process useful to "pause" when analyzing / making decisions and become more aware of which implications can be directly deduced, which ones are hypothesis (thru intuition), and how to verify / refute the latter. I applied the process formally to making a decision to renew third party software license in our organization. One email detailing the situation and decision making process elicited meaningful / thoughtful / comprehensive comments and fact gathering.