By Philip Mudd

Become a excessive potency Analytic selection maker.

We've all been there: confronted with a tremendous choice, but beaten through the very facts that's speculated to support us. It’s an all-too-common fight within the electronic age, whilst Google searches produce 1000000 ends up in a break up moment and software program courses supply research swifter than lets ever desire to learn it.

Adapting the geopolitical and historic classes gleaned from over 20 years in executive intelligence, Philip Mudd―an ex–National defense Council employees member and previous senior government on the FBI and the CIA―finally supplies us the definitive guidebook for a way to process advanced judgements this present day. jam-packed with logical but counterintuitive solutions to bland and amazing problems―whether or not it's paying for a brand new domestic or pivoting a failing enterprise model―Mudd’s "HEAD" (High potency Analytic Decision-making) technique presents readers with a battle-tested set of guiding ideas that promise to carry order to even the main chaotic difficulties, all in 5 sensible steps:

What's the question? Analysts frequently think that questions are self-evident, yet concentrating on higher questions up entrance constantly yields greater solutions later.

• What are your "drivers?" The human brain has a troublesome time juggling details, so analysts want a method to collapse complicated questions into assorted features or “drivers.”

How will you degree performance? as soon as the query has been solidified and the "drivers" made up our minds, an analyst needs to make a decision what metrics they're going to use to appreciate how a problem―and their strategy to it―is evolving over time.

What in regards to the data? instead of each piece of knowledge by itself and up entrance, an analyst can simply triumph over information overload by means of plugging facts into their "driver" different types and excising something that does not fit.

What are we missing? complicated research is not effortless, so it truly is valuable to imagine that the method is defective, whereas additionally understanding find out how to money for attainable gaps and error, resembling availability bias, halo results, and intuitive as opposed to analytic methodologies.

Drawing deeply from his personal harrowing experiences―and mistakes―in the road of accountability, Mudd has spent years refining and instructing his method to Fortune 500 businesses and govt businesses. Now, within the best-selling culture of Charles Duhigg's The strength of Habit and Oren Klaff's Pitch Anything, Philip Mudd's The HEAD Game can switch how you either dwell and work.

Show description

Read Online or Download The HEAD Game: High-Efficiency Analytic Decision Making and the Art of Solving Complex Problems Quickly PDF

Best intelligence & espionage books

Managing Risk in USAF Planning

Provides a risk-management method could support senior Air strength leaders to (1) concentration making plans at the so much salient threats, (2) achieve larger readability at the dangers linked to substitute classes of motion throughout a number of futures, (3) continue a feeling of the continual uncertainties linked to any coverage selection, and (4) successfully speak their judgments approximately possibility to key audiences.

Networks and Netwars : The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy

Netwar―like cyberwar―describes a brand new spectrum of clash that's rising within the wake of the data revolution. What special netwar is the networked organizational constitution of its practitioners and their quickness in coming jointly in swarming assaults. To confront this new form of clash, it is necessary for governments, army, and legislation enforcement to start networking themselves.

Nazi Refugee Turned Gestapo Spy: The Life of Hans Wesemann, 1895-1971

Why might a journalist who was once an ardent socialist and an anti-Nazi throughout the waning years of the Weimar Republic choose to visit paintings for the Gestapo overseas? Hans Wesemann, a veteran of worldwide battle I and a profitable journalist, fled his local Germany in 1933 after writing a couple of anti-Nazi articles.

The Easy Day Was Yesterday: The Extreme Life of An SAS Soldier

From his cage in a putrid, overcrowded Indian gaol, Paul Jordan displays on a existence lived at the part and curses the miscalculation that robbed him of his freedom. His adolescence, marred via the lack of his father and brother, makes him hell bent on being the easiest of the easiest – an ambition he achieves via being chosen to affix the elite SAS.

Additional resources for The HEAD Game: High-Efficiency Analytic Decision Making and the Art of Solving Complex Problems Quickly

Example text

THE MARRIAGE QUESTION: IS SHE PERFECT? OR IS SHE RIGHT FOR ME? Riding in a car with a good friend a few years ago, I listened to him speak about how he came to the decision to propose to his girlfriend. I know her well; under any definition of a good partner, she is great. She is smart, even-tempered, beautiful, and good-humored. But, as my friend said that afternoon in the car, she and he differed occasionally, as they got to know each other and as any healthy couple would. “She can be tough,” he said.

If you think you’re going to finish and have some sort of breakthrough moment, then think again. This is more like beginning an exercise program when you’re out of shape. You can read a good fitness book, or even the best fitness book, but that book doesn’t begin to shed fat and mold muscle. The same holds true for your mind. This parallel between mind and body doesn’t end there. Just as the greatest pain that punishes your body comes when you first start down the road to fitness and a healthier life, the worst part of exercising your mind using this analytic process will come at the outset, and you will be tempted to get off the mental treadmill when you start reading this book, because the mental exercise hurts.

Before we continue, though, we have to lay down one marker, a side note about the importance of separating analysis from decision-making. The analyst is responsible for helping the customer—whether it’s the president of the United States or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company—so that the customer can make decisions that are founded on a solid combination of fact, supposition, and expert judgment. The analyst is not, however, the best-positioned person in the room to make the final judgment about what the president or the CEO should do.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.26 of 5 – based on 42 votes