Never Go with Your Gut

How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Avoid Terrible Advice, Cognitive Biases, and Poor Decisions)

By: Gleb Tsipursky PhD, Howard J. Ross - foreword

Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins

Avoid terrible advice, cognitive biases, and poor decisions.

Want to avoid business disasters, whether minor mishaps, such as excessive team conflict, or major calamities like those that threaten bankruptcy or doom a promising career? Fortunately, behavioral economics studies show that such disasters stem from poor decisions due to our faulty mental patterns - what scholars call "cognitive biases" - and are preventable.

Unfortunately, the typical advice for business leaders to "go with their guts" plays into these cognitive biases and leads to disastrous decisions that devastate the bottom line. By combining practical case studies with cutting-edge research, Never Go With Your Gut will help you make the best decisions and prevent these business disasters.

The leading expert on avoiding business disasters, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, draws on over 20 years of extensive consulting, coaching, and speaking experience to show how pioneering leaders and organizations - many of them his clients - avoid business disasters. Reading this book will enable you to:

• Discover how pioneering leaders and organizations address cognitive biases to avoid disastrous decisions.
• Adapt best practices on avoiding business disasters from these leaders and organizations to your own context.
• Develop processes that empower everyone in your organization to avoid business disasters.

©2019 Gleb Tsipursky (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.

Excellent Work!

As a young professional in business and finance, I prefer learning that is seamless, flexible, and holistic. With using continuous improvement in gaining competitive advantage, this book opened room for learning the psychology of non-monetary considerations in decision making. Reading about sections regarding the scandals with Enron and Tyco reminded me of the ever famous Madoff Scandal. I could not guarantee the motive behind such malpractice and defrauding but had Bernie been aware of different kinds of biases, he might have found a way to revive and straighten the operations. With reading points in this book, my key take away was: we are more evolved beings. We should no longer be carried away by intuitions and gut feelings because of biases. We are lucky enough that works specially the advocacy of Dr. Tsipursky (to be more reliant on science based decision making) are already being shared to us. I became reminiscent to the time I had a costly training when I read on the eight step decision making. To make my story short, I took on an overpriced training without looking at the situation holistically. I ended up spending a lot more than I could've afforded at the time. I love the story on Patricia, the CPA who wanted to leave her job. This is an unexpected take away from me because I am guilty of this cognitive bias: THE STATUS QUO BIAS. I tend to stay on the comfort or safe zone. With all the guide and key points in this group, I feel I can step out of my comfort zone and make better decisions.

Great Book!

If you want to save your business from yourself or your gut decision, and want to avoid disasters, this book would be very helpful for you. Most of the business leaders take decisions from their heart, not from their head.
“Never Go With Your Gut” is a book written by Dr. Gleb Tsipursky who is a disaster avoidance expert. In this book the author simply describe the way to avoid other terrible advice, cognitive biases and wrong decisions in the work-place thus a business leader can be able to avoid business disasters.

When I completed my MBA, I wanted to be a leader and started my own online business. I thought if I follow my passion I must be successful. When I launch my favorable product in my locality without verifying the demand in the market, I saw that this product is not properly welcomed by the consumer. They would like to buy this product from local market rather than online market. My gut decision about which product had to launch in online business sector proved wrong. If I had this book earlier, perhaps I could have avoided some bad situations in my life.

There are many cognitive biases and dangerous judgmental error which has great impact on our gut based decisions. I found 12 specific techniques to address dangerous judgmental errors in this book. It includes Identify elements and make a plan, Probabilistic thinking, make predictions about the future, Consider alternative options, past experiences and other people’s perspectives and so on. I think it helps me to take proper decision in workplace.

Another cognitive bias which is described in this book is overconfidence. As a leader one should have to be confident, not overconfident. Dr. Gleb Tsipursky identified some judgmental errors in our professional life and included many exercises for us. I feel that this book is highly recommended for leaders, decision makers and business professionals. Thanks all.

Just Awesome Writing!

Reading books on various subjects imparts information and increases the depth about the subject as well. This book will guide me to understand the most significant ones for business settings. I would like to give my heartfelt thanks to Dr. Tsipursky to launch such a thoughtful book which helped me to become more productive & thoughtful. I think reading the book would be helpful for me because this book focuses, not only on the cognitive biases that can derail us at any stage of the decision-making process, but also on how we can resolve these issues. Also I tend to choose what’s comfortable rather than what’s true or good for me. I think I should read this book as I am a professional who wants to avoid disastrous judgment errors in managing my present and future career. We can train our intentional system to spot and address our systematic and predictable dangerous judgment errors in business and other life areas.

This book would have been helpful in the past as I was a small business owner who wanted to lead the organization safely and securely into the increasingly disrupted future and avoid the trip wires that will cause competitors to stumble. After completion of my Engineering I served 2.5 years in a multinational organization also achieved the Best Employee Award but suddenly the official environment changed & I had to leave the job. I was mentally so depressed that time & started small business without thinking its future. For that reason, my product selection & marketing policy was wrong. If I would get chance to read this book earlier, it will mark a paradigm shift in my professional lives. I truly feel that after reading this book I won’t fall into cognitive biases.

By reading the book I came to know about the halo effect which describes a mental error we make when we like one important characteristic of a person; we then subconsciously raise our estimates of that person’s other characteristics. I also came to know about the horns effect reflects the mistake of subconsciously lowering our estimates of a person when we don’t like one salient characteristic. We fall too easily for repeated rumors in business settings. When we like one important characteristic of a person, our gut moves us to overestimate all other positive aspects of that person and downplay any negatives; the reverse happens when we don’t like one important characteristic, this read proved surprising and unexpected for me. When going with our gut, we pay too much attention to the most emotionally relevant factors in our immediate environment, the ones that feel like they are the most critical, whether or not they’re the most important ones. This will be taking forward with me.

A cognitive bias I found in the book is “Self-serving bias”, a problem I often see undermining teamwork and collaboration, namely, when people tend to claim credit for success and deflect blame for failure. People might call this human nature, but behavioral science scholars call this the self-serving bias. I truly agree Poor strategic leadership decision-making is responsible for such disasters, yet neither these leaders nor their followers received professional development in making decisions. I always believe in the phrase which is perfectly described in this book that “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”, this is mental error, people with limited knowledge on a topic feel much more confident about their judgments compared with true experts on a topic. This book allows me to know that successful people are uncomfortable with the realization that luck sometimes plays a much larger role in the success of decision-makers than skill. The best that decision-makers can do is maximize the possibility of success, and then roll the dice.

Nice One From Gleb

When I came across this book I was impressed because I am the kind of person who likes to be different in my way. When others are going left, I would rather go right. This book title kind of drew me towards a feeling of a sense of belonging that I finally found something that takes sides with me, so I wanted to learn more. No doubt, I don't trust my gut at times, I make decisions based on logistics and am still figuring out better ways to make effective decisions until I came to know about the rich content of this book. After reading each chapter of the book, I discovered I am a victim of what the book describes as the Dunning Kruger Effect. In a section that discussed The Many Flavors of Overconfidence The phrase “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing” helps explain a cognitive bias related to overconfidence called the Dunning-Kruger effect. As a professional, my overconfidence has been my greatest disaster as I applied the same strategy to succeed consequently and this method doesn't always provide the desired results for what am expecting. Moreover, the 8 step decision-making model has been my latest key and approach towards making impactful business decisions and this book has finally been the missing piece I need to fill in the void as a successful business leader in effective decision making. In the aspect of failing to plan and plan to fail, I am recently a victim of that. One month ago I made a decision using my autopilot system and it got the better of me. I lost a fortune down the drain because of my bad choices. If I had read this book earlier, I would have been intentional in my decisions and I wouldn't have regretted my choices then because I would have selected better options. Having (to) read this book, I'm privileged to be exposed to these ideas discussed in it compared to other business leaders or any other professionals who are still unaware of the dangers of typical judgment errors in the work-place. Learning about the thirty cognitive biases described in this book represent the biggest threats to your business and career success. Every CEO, Leader, Small business owner, and aspiring boss or leader needs a copy of this book. I strongly recommend this book to guide you on the right path as well thought out decisions determines how far a plan of action can succeed.