Whether you are the head of a corporation or just an employee, decision making is one of the most powerful skills to learn given that it demonstrates confidence and accuracy on the choices that you make.
Decision making doesn’t always come easy and sometimes the simplest decisions are the ones that matter most.
It is said that high level job interviews are always on the look out for those who can make decisions with speed and accuracy.
The simple act of knowing what to do when others can’t seem to decide is one of the many leadership skills that you want to incorporate into your life if you want to succeed at the highest level.
While improving your decision making skills can be quite challenging, the following books on decision making will be a great starting point when it comes to learning how to sharpen your skills.
Table of Contents
- Best Decision Making Books
- Critical Thinking And Problem Solving
- The Great Mental Models
- Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts
- Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions
- Thinking, Fast and Slow
- Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
- Why Not?: How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big And Small
- Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
- How We Decide
Best Decision Making Books
Critical Thinking And Problem Solving
Author: Carl Patterson
Critical thinking brings about excellent resolutions to issues that can’t seem to be solved. In order to make the right decisions, we need to understand how to come up with a plan and think clearly. Carl Patterson explains how to make rational decisions by using the power of critical thinking. This is one you won’t want to miss.
The Great Mental Models
Authors: Farnam Street, Shane Parrish, Rhiannon Beaubien
This book uses the toolbox as a metaphor to demonstrate how we can’t work with just one tool in order to get something done, but we need to learn how to use multiple tools to our advantage. When it comes to the best decision making books, this one is highly recommended as it provides you with solutions that you can use to fix just about any problem you face along the road of life.
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts
Author: Annie Duke
Thinking in Bets teaches us how to think about decisions differently when some people plan their decisions based on whether the outcome will turn good or bad. Annie Duke attempts to demonstrate to the reader that we should think about decisions as a poker game — decisions based on probability. This book is about taking a different approach to decision making, and it’s a quite interesting one.
Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions
Authors: John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, and Howard Raiffa
This book is all about making smart choices from the get go. Each author lists different methodologies to follow in order to make better decisions. Their formulas utilize the following points in order to make well-thought out decisions: Focusing on the problem to work out the right decision, setting objectives to accomplish, alternative options and solutions that affect the end results and many more useful tips and tricks.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Author: Daniel Kahneman
Written by Daniel Kahneman, a renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, this book is recommended for learning how to be a more organized thinker. Thinking, Fast and Slow will explain to you how your brain works in order for you to be able to understand how you should be dealing with outcome solutions. If you are looking for an informative book filled with recognized studies, this is the one for you.
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
Authors: Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
Nudge is about how the way we think of our present options when trying to solve a problem and how they can affect our decisions. All of the decisions that we make are influenced by our opinions and for that reason, we aren’t always impartial whenever we need to make a choice about something. This book is great for improving decision making without being biased.
Why Not?: How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big And Small
Author: Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres
Most unique ideas come from these two basic methods: problems in search of solutions and solutions in search of problems. This book basically says you can do anything you can in order to make the right decision, don’t stop at just one solution but branch out and think of all the possible outcomes.
Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
Authors: Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
Algorithms to Live By is an excellent book as it uses solutions to computer problems and applies them to problems we face as humans. Who would have thought that computer science solutions would be able to help us learn how to stay organized and improve our overall efficiency?
How We Decide
Author: Jonah Lehrer
Making decisions based on emotional thinking isn’t always the smartest way to approach things. Whenever we need to think clearly we need to take out the factor of emotions in order to make more reasonable and rational decisions. However, knowing that it is very hard to separate our emotional sides from our decision making, Lehrer explains through his book how we can use this side to our advantage in order to make better decisions.
Did you find this list of decision making books to be helpful? If I missed one that you recommend, please leave a comment below.
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