For a lengthier excerpt from the book’s preface, click here

The Go Point

 When It's Time to Decide

Michael Useem

Preface

Imagine for a moment that you are taken out of your normal day-to-day life and thrust as a wildland firefighter into the midst of a raging Colorado fire, becoming the de facto leader of a crew whose goal is to stop it from spreading.  With scant information available about weather conditions you urgently have to decide where your crew should go – up the mountain or down – and your forced choice has potential life and death consequences. 

Or you are now on the bond trading floor at Lehman Brothers and you have to make multi-million dollar buy or sell decisions that will have huge consequences not only for the profitability of your firm but also your year-end bonus.

Or perhaps you are the new chief executive of Hewlett-Packard forced to clean up the mess left by your predecessor who pushed through a decision to merge Compaq Computer company with your own struggling computer operation.  Jobs are going to be cut, perhaps entire divisions dissolved.  How do you decide who goes and what stays?

All of these are go points, times to decide, moments for saying yes or no, instants for jumping one direction or another when the fate of others depends on it.  When should you do it, and how should you do it? 

To master of the art and practice of being decisive, our account will take you to some of the most daunting terrains on earth – from a burning mountain in Montana to the highest mountain in the Himalaya, from a corporate boardroom to a Civil War battlefield, from a troubled Tyco to surging Lenovo.  We will combat a forest fire, climb Mt. Everest, peer into a boardroom, and see for ourselves how Confederate General Robert E. Lee decided to launch Pickett’s Charge.  But we will also witness people making less time-bound or momentous decisions:  training astronauts, writing poetry, prepping a quarterback, leading a church, taking a job.  And we will make four decisions of our own by applying what we have learned from those who have staked their companies, their careers, their countries on reaching the right decision.

The Go Point takes you inside the heart and head of people at their go point.  And from their experience and that of our own we will build a decision-making template, the principles and tools for being decisive at times when it really counts:  Using small steps to make hard decisions, building a network of counselors and oracles for testing ideas, keeping options open until they must be closed.

This book is built on more than a hundred interviews and observations of leading decision makers, mostly conducted between 2002 and 2006.  For the interviews, my approach has been to ask the individuals to describe and analyze decisions they have made with consequences for those around and dependent upon them.  What were their best and worst decisions, their most challenging ones?  How did they reach them?  What factors brought them to their individual go-points?  What would they change and what have they learned?  During the interviews, generally sixty minutes in length but sometimes shorter and other times far longer, I kept detailed notes and often a digital recording. 

I sought interviews with people from a broad cross-section of professions and callings: a NASA astronaut, a Marine colonel and a thoracic surgeon, an Episcopal Bishop; school teachers, corporate executives, Chinese entrepreneurs.  Many are not explicitly referenced in the book’s text, but their experience and thinking is reflected throughout the book.  The settings for the interviews ranged from executives suites to classrooms, trail sides, and training centers.  I accompanied a wildland fire team as it fought a blaze in California, spent hours on a trading floor of an investment bank, and joined a day-long briefing by those who run the training program for astronauts at Houston’s Johnson Space Center.

At times, I have also observed decision makers as they described, analyzed or even engaged in decisions with consequences for others.  And in some cases I was able to both observe and interview the individuals in question, sometimes on multiple occasions.  All moments of observation were accompanied by detailed note taking and in some instances audio and even video recording. 

High profile figures such as Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers; General Peter Pace, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff; former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina; Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf; and New York Times chairman Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. have shared or conveyed their decision-making experiences, but I have also looked in more out of the way corners, where the decisions taken or avoided had dramatic consequences for those involved.  I hiked a fire zone on Colorado’s Storm King Mountain with seventeen professional fire fighters, seeking to understand the chain of go-points that had led an earlier group to be engulfed by a lethal blow-up in 1994, and I talked with a survivor of a well-known airplane crash in the Andes.

In addition to the interviews, I have devoted more than forty days to the study of decision making by the Civil War commanders who fought at Gettysburg.  Time and again I have walked that hallowed battlefield with managers and MBA students accompanied by U.S. National Park Service licensed battlefield guides William Bowling, Hans Henzel, and Charles Fennell and, during one of those days, Civil War historian James M. McPherson.   

As part of the Wharton Leadership Ventures, I have also observed managers and MBA students making hundreds of decisions on everything from route finding to program restructuring in venues as far-flung as Patagonia and even Antarctica.  In conjunction with a leadership development program for the Philadelphia public-school system, I have informally discussed with teachers and administrators how they go about making decisions.  Lessons in decision making, in go-pointing, can be found literally everywhere.

In all these interviews and observations, I have looked for both recurrent themes and unique experiences across a range of organizations and even national boundaries.  I have sought to extract what is most enduringly important for decision makers when they carry responsibility for others, regardless of the context.  I have also drawn upon a broad range of research studies and historical accounts, some but not all cited in the pages of this text.  The decision principles and tools identified here bear a huge debt to all those who have lent me their time, their experience, and their intellects.