Judgment Calls: 12 Stories of Big Decisions and the Teams That Got Them Right

Your guide to making better decisions

Despite the dizzying amount of data at our disposal today--and an increasing reliance on analytics to make the majority of our decisions--many of our most critical choices still come down to human judgment. This fact is fundamental to organizations whose leaders must often make crucial decisions: to do this they need the best available insights.

In Judgment Calls, authors Tom Davenport and Brook Manville share twelve stories of organizations that have successfully tapped their data assets, diverse perspectives, and deep knowledge to build an organizational decision-making capability--a competence they say can make the difference between success and failure. This book introduces a model that taps the collective judgment of an organization so that the right decisions are made, and the entire organization profits.

Through the stories in Judgment Calls, the authors--both of them seasoned management thinkers and advisers--make the case for the wisdom of organizations and suggest ways to use it to best advantage. Each chapter tells a unique story of one dilemma and its ultimate resolution, bringing into high relief one key to the power of collective judgment. Individually, these stories inspire and instruct; together, they form a model for building an organizational capacity for broadly based, knowledge-intensive decision making.

You've read The Wisdom of Crowds and Competing on Analytics. Now read Judgment Calls. You, and your organization, will make better decisions.

Thomas H. Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Chair at Babson College, a research fellow at the MIT Center for Digital Business, and a Senior Advisor to Deloitte Analytics. He is the author or coauthor of fourteen books, including Competing on Analytics. Brook Manville is an independent consultant and the author of several publications on issues of strategy and organizational development. He previously served as Chief Learning Officer for Saba Software and the United Way of America, and before that was McKinsey & Company’s first Director of Knowledge Management.