Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls

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Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
With good judgment, little else matters. Without it, nothing else matters.

Whether were talking about United States presidents, CEOs, Major League coaches, or wartime generals, leaders are remembered for their best and worst judgment calls. In the face of ambiguity, uncertainty, and conflicting demands, the quality of a leaders judgment determines the fate of the entire organization. Thats why judgment is the essence of leadership.

Yet despite its importance, judgment has always been a fairly murky concept. The leadership literature has been conspicuously quiet on what, exactly, defines it. Does judgment differ from common sense or gut instinct? Is it a product of luck? Of smarts? Or is there a process for making consistently good calls?

Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis have each spent decades studying and teaching leadership and advising top CEOs such as Jack Welch and Howard Schultz. Now, in their first collaboration, they offer a powerful framework for making tough calls when the stakes are high and the right path is far from obvious. They show how to recognize the critical moment before a judgment call, when swift and decisive action is essential, and also how to execute a decision after the call.

Tichy and Bennis bring their three-dimensional model to life with interviews with world-class leaders who have thrived or suffered because of their judgment calls. These stories include:

Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, whose judgment to grow through research and development transformed GE into the worlds premier technology growth company.
Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, who made tough calls about teachers, students, and parents while turning around a troubled school system.
Jim McNerney, CEO of Boeing, whose strategic judgment helped him reinvigorate his company and restore a culture of trust and respect.
The late general Wayne Downing, who found an unexpected opportunity in the midst of crisis when he led the Special Operations raid to capture Manuel Noriega.
A. G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble, who bet $57 billion to purchase Gillette and reinvent his company.
Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy, who made the call to commit totally to a customer-centric strategy and led his people to execute it.

Whether youre running a small department or a global corporation, Judgment will give you a framework for evaluating any situation, making the call, and correcting if necessary during the execution phase. It will show you how to handle the overlapping domains of people, strategy, and crisis management. And it will help you teach your entire team to make the right call more often.

No organization can afford to neglect this crucial disciplineand no previous book has ever brought it into such clear focus.

Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

Why a great leader "is the Copernican pivot at the center of the decision-making process" November 10, 2007
34 out of 37 found this review helpful

This is the first book on which Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis have collaborated. Separately, each has already authored or co-authored several of the most influential business books, including Tichy's The Cycle of Leadership: How Great Leaders Teach Their Companies to Win and The Leadership Engine as well as Bennis' Geeks & Geezers (later reissued as Leadership for a Lifetime) and On Becoming A Leader: The Leadership Classic.

In the first chapter, Tichy and Bennis assert that what really matters "is not how many calls a leader gets right, or even what percentage of calls a leader gets right. Rather it is important how many of the important ones he or she gets right." They go on to suggest that effective leaders "not only make better calls, but they are able to discern the really important ones and get a higher percentage of them right. They are better at a whole process that runs from seeing the need for a call, to framing issues, to figuring out what is critical, to mobilizing and energizing the troops."

Of special interest to me are the different perspectives on the decision making process preferred by a number of exemplary CEOs who include Brad Anderson (Best Buy), Steve Bennett (Intuit), A.G. Lafley (Procter & Gamble), James McNerney (Boeing), and David Novak (Yum! Brands). For example, Immelt's "Boom, I make the decision" comes after he has obtained all the input needed. "There is a moment when, based on his view of time horizon for the judgment and sufficiency of input and involvement, the leader makes the call."

According to Tichy and Bennis, there is a framework of three "critical domains" within which all decisions are made. Judgments about people are the most difficult, and most critical; the others involve strategy and crisis. They stress that good judgment calls are a process, not an event. Each begins when a leader recognizes a need and frames the decision to be made, with the process continuing through execution and adjustment. They also stress the importance of possessing sufficient self-knowledge because making a right call "isn't a solo performance; support teams are vital." I appreciate the fact that Tichy and Bennis employ a framework of their own when presenting the material concerning the "framework of leadership judgment." Specifically, they anchor several exemplary, real-world decisions in terms of their storyline and then their preparation, judgment, execution, and evaluation phases.

For example, Tichy and Bennis provide this excerpt from CEO Magazine in which A.G. Lafley explains the storyline for the future success of P&G, one that created the stage to make critical judgments:

"Everything begins here with our purpose. It's very simple. We provide branded products that improve everyday lives. The values of the company are integrity, trust, ownership, leadership, passion for service and winning...Then we turn to strategy which is choices. Our whole focus has been to grow and profit from the core - and that means core businesses, core capabilities, core technologies...Then (the other piece of this) is selecting, developing, training, teaching, and coaching the leadership team. They are the leadership engine...It's one team with one purpose and one dream and one set of strategic choices."

Many of those who read this book will especially appreciate a substantial value-added benefit: the "Handbook for Leadership Judgment" that follows the concluding chapter. In it, Chris DeRose and Tichy provide what I view as an operations manual that will enable a reader to apply what she or he has learned in ways and to an extent that are appropriate to achieving her or his own organization's specific objectives. DeRose and Tichy make an important distinction between judgment and decision making. "Much of the academic literature and popular notions of decision making culminate in a single moment when the leader makes a decision. In this handbook, we focus on judgment as a process that unfolds over time."

Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis have provided a brilliant explanation of how winning leaders make great calls and suggest that the greatest among them also help others to do so. (It is worth noting that Immelt spends approximately 25% of his time helping to develop leadership skills in GE's middle managers.) Although their book will be of interest and value to C-level executives, I think it will also be of substantial benefit, especially to others now preparing for a business career or who have only recently embarked on one. It is imperative for them to understand as soon as possible that the process of making "great calls" requires a parallel, on-going process of increasing knowledge about one's self, one's social network, one's organization, and finally, about the context within which each "call" is made.

The framework that Tichy and Bennis provide gives structure to the process of knowledge acquisition and evaluation; they also suggest a frame-of-reference within which to consider various options when making a decision. As the dozens of real-world examples they citer clearly indicate, all decisions have consequences. Obviously, the more difficult a decision is, the more serious its consequences can be...and usually are. The great leader possesses the judgment to make the "right call." That is why she or he "is the Copernican pivot at the center of the decision-making process."

3 out of 5 stars

Love the book and am deeply frustrated by the book... January 19, 2008
17 out of 29 found this review helpful

"You Know You're Over The Target If You're Taking Flak"
-attrib. to Gen. Curtis LeMay

Off the bat, this is a well thought out, valuable, and necessary work. Bennis and Tichy have deconstructed the higher level processes which bring success or lead to failure primarily in corporate environments. Not bad and a pretty well aimed shot at the intended target.

The critique: Bennis and Tichy write, and appear to think almost exclusively in large granules, what linguists refer to as *nominalizations*, or complex, through time processes which have been pelletized for easy consumption. This is, in my opinion, a major cognitive flaw in the design of their presentation.

The tone of the work evokes a sort of deeply tanned macho corporate dude wearing tinted aviator frames and holding forth at an off site retreat wearing a vicuna brown blazer and an open collar, speaking in a rich boardroom baritone which admits no doubts nor confounding deviations from the Teachable Point Of View... a concept that is both initially compelling and somehow creepily suggestive of honey dipped authoritarianism.

And therein lie some of the problematics. This Mister Man pelletized crunchy corporate-speak does not, perhaps can not, drill down into the significantly impactful details of how it translates into the deep psychological layers of the individuals concerned, or the strata of collective psychodynamics, except to speak in broad glosses of "brand pride" or "guts"... which could mean many things or nothing in particular, or whatever you want it to mean in any given context.

Which of course circles back directly onto their central thesis, Name and Frame. Unfortunately, they appear to have only the faintest notions of the cognitive, perceptual, intrapsychic, belief structural, anthropologic, cultural, or historical models for just exactly what this Big Pellet, "Naming and Framing", is all about, or what forms of Mental Models are required to do it right, how one goes about obtaining or constructing those mental models, what metabeliefs would be required to construcively engage one's deep structure belief systems, how unconscious and conscious processes continuously interact to pre-frame, re-frame, up-frame, down-frame, cross-frame, perspective reverse, sequentialize, randomize in an expanded process of frame refinement. In other words, their Frame of Frames appears to be impoverished. The masterful executive needs an effectively expanded structure of frame discovery. Just huffing and puffing and chanting Frame and Name simply doesn't cut it. More is needed, more fine grained specificity, more How To at the thought process, inner life, imagination at work level. Trying to get off the hook by pointing out Jeff Immelt and intoning, "be like him" isn't going to get the plane off the ground.

We need to know, what actually goes on those "transformational" off site convocations ? What is it that makes them transformational ? Judgement, the book, must have at least one hundred references to these organizational-mystical experiences without the slighest expansion on what is the quality gradient that distinguishes the superb, the pretty good, the mediocre off site executive whatever the heck it is. Do they hug trees ? Tell their deepest fears ? Cry in front of everybody ?

Seriously, if the authors are going to make such a big deal about these encounter processes as an implicate ingredient in corporate transformation, why don't they fine grain it and get down into the nitty gritty of how this happens ? When have they worked ? When have they failed ? What is their structure ? How was the skill set for running them obtained ?

The goal of said sturm und drang is of course, Judgement.... and in the matter of Judgement, the authors are very anti-blink, anti-Gladwellian ( while apparently leaving the granddaddy of slow thinking, Edward deBono conveniently unmentioned)... some practical experience with life lived foreward suggests that good judgement may well be the optimal interaction between slow time processes, where sequence, process, and recursion dominate, and fast time processes where intuition and wholism play an important part. It would be poor judgement to discard or devalue *either* set of mental processes, because the human brain has evolved with substantial processing capacity in both domains. Brain science has clearly, and unambiguously proven that basic perceptual processes such as ordinary hearing pass though dual pathways of instantaneous (IIR filters) and sequential (FIR filters) which then converge at a stage of perceptual integration. To insist that one processing chain must take precedence over another because it is better in some circumstances is just dumb. And dumb is not good judgement.

What we DO need, and we need clear, cogent, the buck stops here crisp and to the point explications of is HOW the brain, from micro-cognition and up, performs a well executed Name and Frame process, and HOW one optimizes Blink Think with DeBono Thinking, and HOW a best practices off site training is done, WITHOUT resorting to more sunbaked corporatist jargon.

Among many, many other HOWs we would love to know more about.

But, that would take intellectual guts, that would take getting out of the Business Book Comfort Zone into the deeper waters of real self examination, real questioning, real frame busting... in other words, IF the authors are made out of the stuff they are exhorting their readers to be made from, they are going to have to take one whopping spoonful of their own medicine and transform their own thought processes and modes of inquiry such that they become self empowered to produce a deeply revealing, process explanatory, de-pelletized work of constructive analysis.

Maybe they're up to it, maybe they're not. Some talk the talk, some walk the walk. We shall see.

5 out of 5 stars

Judgement is the real deal November 25, 2007
8 out of 10 found this review helpful

Bottom line on Tichy and Bennis's book: Good judgement is judged by the bottom line. Period. Did you succeed? Great. Then you made the right decision. In a way only Tichy and Bennis can, they dice out the stuff that makes you succeed. It's a brilliant wake up call for those of us who think simple rules will make us winners, and a strategic planning session for the ones who need to get these concepts imbedded into their team.

Theories on leadership come a dime a dozen. These guys toss out the theories and get down to business. Maybe radical among talking heads in the business world, this model is well steeped in Tichy's background as a Ph.D. psychologist. Almost a century ago Skinner and others pointed out that a reward wasn't what was fun or what made you happy. It was the thing that caused you to do more of whatever it is the rewarder wanted. This bottom line approach to psychology changed child-rearing and treatment of psychiatric disorders forever.

Tichy and Bennis may well change the way we make judgements in business forever. They dice up the good and bad judgements of great leaders inside and outside of commercial business. Then they show us how to do the judgement making. Judgement, they tell us, doesn't occur with the 'aha' moment in the middle of the night, nor does it occur when we cross the rubicon and tell our team of our decision. It happens over time-with thought, preparation, commitment, and execution. Failures anywhere make the judgement end up a failure, while comprehensive planning (a.k.a. hard work) make the judgement more likely to succeed.

In my work as a teacher of leadership in health care I've had the great privilige of watching Tichy do his thing. When he's helping a corporation go through its metamorphisis, he prepares meticulously, negotiates strategically, then give every bit of energy he has to the clients' goals. The process is never a one-off. It's continuous with reinforcement and ongoing communication. And he succeeds. Clearly this book on judgement is not just his observation of others, but a model he himself has followed in his work. Following the lead of one of the world's great leadership experts is not a bad thing. Great stories, great insight, a fun read for those of us who need to ensure our judgements fall into the 'succeeded' category.

5 out of 5 stars

Cracking the Code on JUDGMENT December 6, 2007
6 out of 6 found this review helpful

Hurrah for Noel and Warren. At the very prime of their careers, these distinguished scholars have pooled their knowledge and research to wade in to the deep end of the pool on the murky but critical subject of management judgment. This has been a domain in which many others have feared to swim because of the inherent ambiguity and almost certain exposure to criticism associated with such an interdisciplinary construct.

Both authors have worked in tight with some of the most powerful transformational leaders on the planet. The sheer access these scholars were able to create to high-profile leaders embroiled in some of the major business crises of recent times is quite impressive. Less established scholars would have had to sit on the sidelines as distant observers or head for the basement to run yet another round of experiments on college sophomores. Yet, despite their clear association with these industry titans, Tichy and Bennis make a strong fact-based case against the "superman" idea, focusing instead on the critical information and influence that resides in the members of the team and among the stakeholders surrounding a great leader during times requiring major judgment calls.

Here are some their more important insights into the phenomenon of judgment:

-Judgment is not a discrete event or point decision. It is a process that embedded in and influenced by a set of relationships and a network of stakeholders.

-Judgment should not be evaluated on the basis of taste or idealized style, but on the outcomes it produces. This squares well with a recent empirical study of leadership effectiveness at the University of Chicago, which has made a compelling case that successful leaders are not always the "nice" guys that many social scientists hope to find when they tour the leadership hall of fame.

-Judgment is so important that it can't wait to be framed and developed until it is needed; leaders must make the time to create a point of view and align and engage their team and stakeholders around it before the moment arrives when a judgment call is needed.

-The framework developed to make good judgments in high profile situations is just as relevant for general managers anywhere in an organization facing any major judgment call.

-Of all the classes of judgment calls, the ones involving people are the most critical, from those involving the selection of an organization's new executive leader to those involving who should be on the leader's team.

Perhaps the most important message of the book is that leaders must focus on creating a point of view and align their team and stakeholders around it well in advance of the immediate need for touch personnel, strategic and crisis calls. This book and the grounded insights it provides elevate leadership judgment to the level of other traditionally important general management disciplines.

The bottom line on Judgment, and that is precisely where the authors fix their interpretation of a successful call, is that if more executive leaders and general managers used the framework developed in this book the quality of their judgment calls would certainly improve significantly. Indeed, Tichy and Bennis not only have been able to crack the code of judgment at the most strategic level and involving some of the more critical judgments calls in recent business history, but also to translate these insights into a practical framework that is accessible and useable by general managers at all organizational levels and facing a very wide variety of challenges.

As an active thought and practice leader in the field of corporate transformation, I will never look at or treat the subject of management judgment quite the same as a result of reading this courageous and impressive book.

Robert H. Miles
President, Corporate Transformation Resources
Author of Leading Corporate Transformation and co-author of BIG Ideas to BIG Results (forthcoming from Financial Times (FT) Press).

5 out of 5 stars

"Impossible is nothing" but Judgment is SOMETHING! November 11, 2007
5 out of 10 found this review helpful

[[ASIN:1591841534 Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls]

Finally, we have the missing link in leadership books. It is the new no nonsense business book, Judgment by Noel Tichy & Warren Bennis. All too often we have read about the intangible components of leadership - charisma, intuition, etc. - as critical to success. In this regard Judgment is the antithesis of that body of leadership publications. Tichy & Bennis present the clear, tangible components of the anatomy of great judgment calls. This book 'teaches' the reader how to make these calls and when to make these calls. Judgment is truly a practitioner's guide to executing value-driven judgment calls. The book even includes such a guide in its appendix! So, if you are ready to take your judgment skills to the next level, you NEED Judgment. [[ASIN:1591841534 Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls]

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