RSPA INSPIRE 2015 Preview: Best Quotes From Heath's "Decisive"

By Jim Roddy, VP of Marketing, RSPA

When the RSPA (Retail Solutions Providers Association) announced that Chip Heath, co-author of business best-sellers Switch and Made to Stick, would be the featured speaker for the INSPIRE 2015 conference, I was super excited. To be able to spend a couple days with one of the world’s leading minds in business is a rare opportunity. And to do that at the Grand Wailea Resort in Maui makes it even better.

I became even more fired up when the RSPA set me up with Heath for an exclusive interview which you can read here on the BSM website. After talking with Heath, I ordered his newest book — Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions in Life and Work — for myself and several of my co-workers.

I recently finished the book and wanted to share with you 24 of the most valuable quotes and concepts:

1. We are quick to jump to conclusions because we give too much weight to the information that's right in front of us, while failing to consider the information that's just offstage.
2. Superb analysis is useless unless the decision process gives it a fair hearing.
3. Focusing is great for analyzing alternatives but terrible for spotting them.
4. Until we are forced to dig up a new option, we are likely to stay fixated on the ones we already have.
5. Considering multiple alternatives seems to undercut politics. With more options, people get less invested in any one of them, freeing them up to change positions as they learn.
6. Centralization, strict controls, and a constant threat of more cuts build a feeling of disempowerment.
7. When you find someone who has solved your problem, you can take your pick from the world’s buffet of solutions. But when you don't bother to look, you've got to cook up the answer yourself.
8. An antidote to hubris is disagreement.
9. Create a safe forum where critics can air their concerns.
10. Sometimes we think we are gathering information when we are actually fishing for support.
11. Assume positive intent: Imagine that the behavior or words of your colleagues are motivated by good intentions, even when their actions seem objectionable at first glance.
12. We are smarter to trust the averages over our own impressions.
13. An expert is simply someone who has more experience than you.
14. Experts are pretty bad at predictions. But they are great at assessing base rates. Keep them talking about the past in the present, not the future.
15. To ignore experts’ experience isn't brave and romantic. Rather, it's egotistical.
16. This preference for testing, rather than planning, was one of the most striking differences between entrepreneurs and corporate executives.
17. In helping us to break a decision a logjam, the single most effective question may be: “What would I tell my best friend to do in this situation?”
18. It's important to enshrine court priorities, not just cheerlead for generic values.
19. One of the classic tensions of management: You want to encourage people to use their judgment, but you also need your team members’ judgments to be correct and consistent.
20. The most direct and difficult way to make a fair decision is to involve as many people as possible and get them all to agree.
21. Compromise is a necessary evil. Compromise can be valuable in itself, because it demonstrates that you've made use of diverse opinions, which is a way of limiting risk.
22. The initial slowness of bargaining may be offset by a critical advantage: It speeds up implementation.
23. Individual decisions will frequently be wrong, but the right process will be an ally in any situation.
24. Bolder is often the right direction. Short-run emotion, as we've seen, makes the status quo seductive.

INSPIRE 2015, the RSPA conference for thought leaders in the retail technology channel, will be held January 25-28, 2015, at the Grand Wailea Resort & Convention Center, Maui, HI. For more information on the RSPA, go to www.BSMinfo.com/solution/InsideRSPA.