Читать книгу Judgment Calls - Thomas H. Davenport - Страница 13

If you think that you have a “golden gut,” that you always make excellent decisions on your own, that you are the only person whose opinions matter within your organization, and that social technologies are purely a waste of time, you probably won't be comfortable with this book—and you should drop it immediately. If you have only read this far, we are confident you can get your money back.

But if you're still reading, that means you believe in the possibility that other people in your organization just might have expertise or opinions that could help in your decisions, and that evidence and data analysis might be helpful in decisions too. Maybe you'd simply like to get a better understanding of the iterative and deliberative decision processes that successful organizations employ. If you are a senior manager within your organization, with responsibility for making the organization better, you have really come to the right place. You naturally would like to help your firm or agency or school make better decisions over time. We hope to convince you that undertaking activities to improve your organization's overall and collective judgment is the best way to bring that about.

If you are an individual contributor or educator or consultant, of course you make decisions too—and you can probably benefit from hearing about better ways to make them. You may not have a large organization that you are trying to get into shape, but everybody is a member of a social network (not Facebook, but the social relationships themselves) from whose wisdom you can benefit, and in the age of the Internet, anybody can gather and analyze some data to help with a difficult problem. We believe that knowing about the organizational context of judgment will help more junior or even free-floating individuals improve their ability to make decisions.

No matter what your employment situation, we think you'll enjoy reading these stories about how organizations are making increasingly good decisions with the new and old tools at their disposal. So we invite you to read through our stories and see where this new world is headed.