Making Decisions: The new brilliant smart-thinking book to change how you think about leadership, judgement and decision making from former England cricket selector Ed Smith
£0.90
Winning takes many forms. For fans of Matthew Syed, this is a great sports book about leadership, judgement and decision-making – rooted in the theory that helped Ed Smith lead England cricket to sustained success. And to help us all win more.
‘An absolutely fascinating book’ THE GAME, The Times football pod
- How do you spot the opportunities that others miss?
- How do you turn a team’s performance around?
- How do you make good decisions amid a tidal wave of information? And how can you improve?
As chief selector for the England cricket team, Ed Smith pioneered new methods for building successful teams and watched his decisions tested in real time on the pitch. During his three-year tenure, England averaged 7 wins in every 10 completed matches, better than they have performed before or since.
Making Decisions reveals Smith’s unique approach to finding success in a fast-changing and increasingly data-reliant world. The best decisions, Smith argues, rely on a combination of differing kinds of intelligence: from algorithms to intuition. This is a truth that the most successful people know: data cannot account for everything, it must be harnessed with human insight. Whatever the power of data, humans aren’t finished yet.
Sharing for the first time the tools he introduced as England selector, Smith’s book captures the immediacy of life at the sharp end, while also exploring frameworks from the top levels of sports, business and the arts. Decision-making is revealed as a creative enterprise, not a reductive system.
Making Decisions offers an invaluable guide for those who want a better framework for developing, explaining and implementing new ideas.
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Additional information
| Publisher | William Collins (15 Sept. 2022) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| File size | 1144 KB |
| Text-to-Speech | Enabled |
| Screen Reader | Supported |
| Enhanced typesetting | Enabled |
| X-Ray | Enabled |
| Word Wise | Enabled |
| Sticky notes | On Kindle Scribe |
| Print length | 223 pages |
by Rebecca Smith
Brilliant, far reaching insight. This is more than a book about sport. Fascinating.
by Spluff
I suspect that those who are looking at this book know Ed Smith from either his cricket career or his writing career. Over the years, he has successfully (in my opinion) reflected some really interesting insights and nuggets from his time in cricket into much broader contexts and themes. My experience of him has been through articles he has written rather than through any of his previous books.
I think his approach through articles serves him well given the constraints of such writing. However, I don’t think he has been quite as successful with this book, where he has space to expand upon his thoughts and show how his ideas would translate more broadly.
The book starts really well, and whilst it is very much written within the context of being a selector, you can see the framework around how decisions were made and how that would give you ideas in which to solve problems you face. But, just like a ball that hasn’t quite got enough momentum and falls inside the boundary rope, so does the narrative. By the end, the broader contexts that were clear in the first part of the book become less apparent, and we get more of a recounting of what happened during his time as a selector.
Having said all of that, I would recommend the book, but what I would really value, I suppose eventually, is for Ed Smith to distill these and other ideas he has had in the past into a clear manifesto of how decision making is an art, not a science.
by Ralph Carter
A fascinating read by an important cricketer & writer.
by C M DAVIES
Another very insightful book by Ed Smith.