Left Brain Right Stuff: How Leaders Make Winning Decisions

Abstract

Listed in the Best Business Books of 2014, Phil Rosenzweig's book presents an interesting point of view on why it is important to consider both left brain (analytic) and right brain (intuitive and judgment based) approaches in any consideration of leadership and managerial behavior. The book is timely because a lot of interest has been focused very recently on "big data" and how managers today have extensive real time data from the marketplace and how, as a consequence, detailed analytical bases can inform managerial decisions. But, the main point of the book is that while analytic (left brain) approaches have indeed expanded greatly as a consequence of our ability to collect and make sense of vast amounts of data inexpensively (often uncovering relationships between managerial decision variables that were not even anticipated), true success in leadership/management often requires an appreciation of specific aspects of the context in which a decision has to be made including the nature of competition which the manager can only gain through employing what the author refers to as the "right stuff" i.e. a careful consideration of the manager's biases and other "qualitative" aspects of the decision context which are then individually discussed in the book's twelve chapters. Before a formal review of the book's content, it is also worth noting that the author is a professor at IMD, Lausanne (Switzerland) which is a major center of executive education and the book, therefore, represents deep insights gained by the author over a long career in consulting and executive teaching.