Why the Particular Interest in Decision-Making?

When I was a young executive at General Motors, I had the common young man's frustration with what seemed to me a series of baffling and irrational decisions that I saw being made at the highest level of the company. At the age 30 or so, I was young enough to be still brash, but in a responsible enough position enough to see what I thought were too many truly dumb decisions being made by the executives of the company.

At that point in my life, being a 20th Century history buff or dilettante ("a person who takes up an art, activity, or subject merely for amusement, esp. in a desultory or superficial way; dabbler"), I came across a book that greatly influenced my interests and thinking ever since -- The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. The book had at that time, during the Viet Nam War, a resurgence of popularity because of its focus on folly in decision-making during war.

Originally published in 1962, it is a military history book that primarily describes the events of the first month of World War I. In addition, the book provides the crucial context for this momentous event of the 20th Century by presenting as  background a brief history of the plans, strategies, world events, international cultures prior to and during the war. The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction for 1962. By the way, Barbara Tuchman is probably the most distinguished female military historian ever and had to overcome more than her share of both blatant and indirect sexism, not unusual in that era.

Why did this book affect me so? It made plain that folly, miscalculations, and misconceptions in decision-making are just somehow inherent in the human condition. The trail of disastrous mistakes made by multiple parties in the run up to WWI was painfully and powerfully described in the Guns of August. I have been studying the good and the bad of decision-making ever since. The most important insights from my study are what I want to briefly cover for you today. Sometimes it seems that we humans haven't learned much since 1914.