Planning, Common Sense, and Superior Performance

This book is intended to help you enhance your common sense (your intuitive decision making skills) as well as your critical thinking skills (your rational planning and decisionmaking skills). A big claim, to be certain, but undoubtedly a valid one. As you are aware, your common sense, and with it your ability to make many decisions almost intuitively with minimum thought, is vastly better today than it was when you were a teenager. Experience and learning that translated itself into better judgment and reasoning ability, accounts for this change. More precisely, new knowledge led to thought habits that became so solid that you spend hardly a moment on decisions to which they apply. That is how common sense and judgment mature. Practicing the relatively simple formula that this book offers, and developing the habit to apply it regularly, will help you take another quantum step toward a higher level of common sense and intuitive reasoning when you develop plans and make decisions. At the same time, the book will provide you with tools that will sharpen your ability to think about work and personal decisions you are facing from a more comprehensive perspective than you are probably doing now. In addition to helping with plans and decisions, the book will show you how to be an more effective leader. If you manage anything, with or without staff, are preparing for managerial responsibities as a college student, or if you seek to take a managerial career track, this book can be of significant use to you. It does not matter whether your career is in business, nonprofit organization, or government, in health care, retail, engineering, or transportation, just to name a few. The concept presented here addresses decisions on matters which, directly or indirectly, involve people. If you are, or expect to be a manager with a small or a large staff, this book will not only help you make better managerial decisions, it will also help you become a better leader. However, even if you are on a professional track where you manage a function, but do not, or will not have anyone reporting to you, your work still has impact on people. In these professional positions the leadership aspects of your managerial responsibilities may just be of smaller impact, overall, on your plans and decisions. You will, nevertheless bring better results if you consider many of the thoughts and concepts discussed here. Moreover, most professionals are frequently in positions on teams or projects where they are likely to assume leadership responsibilities. In these situations, the concepts discussed in this book can be most useful. Even where your leadership and management responsibilities, and decisions, involve family affairs, most of the sections of this book can be valuable. They address key issues for decisionmaking and interpersonal relations, and they do it from a unique and comprehensive perspective.