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the decision-making process itself, rather than just the results of this process. We are
disturbed by the fact that most managers reward results rather than good decisions. As
we have seen, managers make many decisions for the wrong reasons. Nevertheless,
because so many important decisions involve uncertainty, plenty of good decisions turn
out badly, and some bad decisions turn out well. To the extent that a manager rewards
results, and not sound decision making, the manager is likely to be rewarding behaviors
that may not work in the future.
Davis (1971) argues that ‘‘interesting’’ writing leads readers to question issues that
they’d never thought about before. Thus, identifying new issues may be more important
than providing new answers to old questions. In this sense, we hope this book has
succeeded at being interesting by making you aware of aspects of your decision-making
process that inspire new questions and problems.