TTC Video Lectures - Art of Critical Decision Making [Repost]

The ability to make wise, educated decisions is essential to living a successful and fulfilled life.
* When is the right time for your company to change its business model?
* Is moving across the country for a new job the best option for you and your family?
* At what point do you roll out a new product or service currently being tested?
* Should you sell your house now, or wait until the housing market improves?
Whether simple or complex, private or public, decisions are an essential part of your life. Not only do decisions affect your own life for good or ill, they

can also affect the lives of your friends, your family, and your community.
But making a good decision and avoiding a horrible one is not a chance act. It's a skill—one that can be learned, honed, and perfected. Mastering the art of critical decision making is the key to improving your life at home, at work, or in your community. When you understand the necessary components of a smart decision, you can examine mistakes you might have made in the past and sidestep potential mistakes in the future. And when you know the underlying psychological, social, and emotional components that influence decision making—whether they are your own decisions or the decisions of others—you can make sounder choices that produce better results.
Three Levels of Decision Making
The heart of this accessible course is a thorough examination of decision making at three key levels.
The individual level: Studying how individuals make decisions reveals a wealth of insights into how—and why—they make particular choices. Most individuals do
not examine every possible alternative but instead draw on experience and rules of thumb. Most of us, it turns out, are susceptible to what psychologists call
cognitive biases: decision traps that can cause us to make certain systematic mistakes when making choices. You also learn how intuition, surprisingly, is more
than just a gut instinct and represents instead a powerful pattern recognition capability.
The group level: Because you don't always make choices on your own, it's important to understand decision making at the level of group or team. Here, you try
to answer the question of whether groups are "smarter" and more capable of making critical decisions than individuals. The lectures show you problems that
typically arise in group decision-making scenarios, including groupthink (the notorious tendency for groups to be pressured into conforming to a particular
view) and a lack of synergy between team members. You also learn how groups can overcome these and other problems to make better decisions.
The organizational level: Studying decision making on the organizational level requires you to grasp how the structure, systems, and culture of a particular
organization shape the behavior of its individual teams and members. Professor Roberto shows you how history's wrong decisions usually cannot be attributed to
one wrong decision or poor leader. He also demonstrates how some organizations have encouraged and reliably performed vigilant decision making in the face of
risky scenarios.
The Key to Effective Decision Making
Compelling historical and contemporary examples provide a captivating window through which to see the process of decision making at work. In taking key
principles that great scholars and leaders have studied from history, business, and the modern world, Professor Roberto helps you understand exactly how the
successful and unsuccessful decisions involved in these and other events are relevant to your own life.
Learn to Make Smarter Decisions
Whether you're the head of a Fortune 500 company, a government agency, or an everyday household, you constantly make decisions important to you and those
immediately around you. The Art of Critical Decision Making offers you a toolbox of practical knowledge and skills that you can apply to various decisions—
whether large or small—in your everyday life and work.
Professor Roberto's lively lectures are packed with useful anecdotes, tools, and advice designed to improve your own ability to make informed decisions. Among
the many insights you gain from these lectures are that
* a large part of making a good decision is not just solving a problem but accurately defining it;
* framing a decision in terms of what may be lost usually causes us to take greater risks than if a problem is framed in terms of potential gains; and
* hidden problems, not visible ones, are the true enemies of effective critical decision making.
Become a Better Critical Thinker
While a thorough exploration of decision making can be a complex endeavor, it takes a professor as knowledgeable and comprehensible as Professor Roberto to
expose just how easy to grasp this science is. Warm, engaging, and vibrant, Professor Roberto possesses a passion for his field that is undeniably contagious.
You quickly discover why this former professor at Harvard Business School and former visiting associate professor at New York University's Stern School of
Business has won numerous coveted teaching awards. These include Bryant University's Outstanding M.B.A. Teaching Award and, on two occasions, Harvard
University's Allyn A. Young Prize for Teaching Economics.
Professor Roberto has also consulted at and taught in the leadership development programs of a number of America's most prestigious firms, including Apple,
Morgan Stanley, Coca-Cola, and Walmart. This breadth of real-world experience shines through in each one of these 24 captivating lectures, as concepts and
theories that might seem complex and confusing are instead made practical and accessible to everyone.