Decision-Making books

Next time you hear that an apparently perfect marriage between two perfectly well-matched partners is on the rocks, don't be too surprised. It's a clear case of set-up overestima-tion. Frankly, anyone who's spent more than five minutes in a relationship should already know that without ongoing fine-tuning and repairs, it doesn't work. All partnerships have to be consistently nurtured. The most common misunderstanding I encounter is that the good life is a stable state or condi-tion. Wrong. The good life is only achieved through constant readjustment.

Decision makers need to know what events have already occurred that do not fit into their present-day assumptions, and thereby create new realities. Intellectuals and scholars tend to believe that ideas come first, which then lead to new political, social, economic, psychological realities. This does happen, but it is the exception. As a rule, theory does not precede practice. Its role is to structure and codify already proven practice. Its role is to convert the isolated and "atypical" from exception to "rule" and "system," and therefore into something that can be learned and taught and, above all, into something that can be generally applied.