Difficult Decisions: How Leaders Make the Right Call with Insight, Integrity, and Empathy - Hardcover

by Eric Pliner (Author)

What do you do when the algorithm doesn't have the answer?

Countless tools and frameworks claim to make decisions objective and bias-free. But in reality, the defining decisions that leaders face are complex ones with subjective information sources and conflicting courses of action. That's why the toughest choices are left to the leaders, and that's why formulas won't answer them.

In Difficult Decisions: How Leaders Make the Right Call with Insight, Integrity, and Empathy, leadership expert and CEO of YSC Consulting, Eric Pliner, delivers a set of practical tools for readers to make sense of these complex, subjective decisions quickly and with integrity. It presents a path to understanding your own subjectivity, and how your morals, ethics, and responsibilities affect how leaders make the most important decisions.

Difficult Decisions is ideal for executives, managers, and business leaders to examine their own intuition and navigate the most conflicted choices they make. It's a challenging read and an indispensable resource to help readers develop self-reflection, clarify their values, and ultimately make the choice that is most "right" to them.

Front Jacket

In Difficult Decisions: How Leaders Make the Right Call with Insight, Integrity, and Empathy, readers will discover how morals and ethics interact with the day-to-day responsibilities of real leadership and triangulate to point the way towards consistency and confidence that others can trust. As author Eric Pliner shows, when we achieve a profound understanding of ourselves, our organizations, and the world we live in now, the road ahead is illuminated.

Difficult Decisions offers both decision-making theory and a host of practical elements that enable readers to examine and evaluate their predispositions and surrounding context when facing the most challenging leadership questions. Exercises help leaders clarify how their own opinions, perspectives, identities, and experiences translate directly into answers for themselves and others. Case examples from top organizations like Ralph Lauren, Best Buy, and the National Gallery of Art show how some of the most successful leaders have used the book's principles to navigate head-spinning scenarios with skill and humanity.

Inescapably, leaders of all types will be tasked with making hard choices in unprecedented situations. When those challenges arise, the lessons of Difficult Decisions will pay dividends.

Back Jacket

PRAISE FOR DIFFICULT DECISIONS

"There's no real playbook for how to handle difficult situations, but Eric's expertise is as close as you can get. In Difficult Decisions, Eric uses his real-life experience of advising leaders across the globe and distills from it an insightful, practical guide about how to face the most challenging human leadership decisions with real skill. This book could be the next best thing to having Eric in the room guiding you."

--HUBERT JOLY, former Chairman and CEO, Best Buy; bestselling author of The Heart of Business; senior lecturer, Harvard Business School

"Today's business leaders are faced with complex issues that demand rapid response and a course of action that can be fraught with risk. Eric's book offers a timely, steadfast framework for not only making balanced decisions but also communicating them with empathy and integrity--enabling you to create optimal impact with a wide range of stakeholders in these turbulent times."

--KRISTIN PECK, Chief Executive Officer, Zoetis

"A smart, efficient examination of what predicts winning decision-making at the highest levels, Difficult Decisions pairs a simple-to-use model with a fundamental grounding in leading with values. This is a book I'll keep within arm's reach."

--MARTIN WATERS, Chief Executive Officer, Victoria's Secret & Co.

"Eric Pliner does an artful job of using practical, real-life examples combined with concrete tools to guide leaders on how to approach decision-making when there can be many 'right' answers, but perhaps only one that matches the moment for that particular leader in that particular context. Pliner's responsibility triangle enables making the optimal decision between a leader's morals, ethics, and positioning within one's stakeholder universe. This is a must-read for all CEOs."

--TJADA D'OYEN MCKENNA, Chief Executive Officer, Mercy Corps

"Eric Pliner is a fabulous teacher. He takes the greatest challenge leaders face--making difficult decisions--and shares deep, practical insights about how to make the right call, ensuring in the process that we are the best leaders we can be. An indispensable book."

--HORTENSE LE GENTIL, Author of Aligned: Connecting Your True Self with the Leader You're Meant to Be

Author Biography

ERIC PLINER is Chief Executive Officer of YSC Consulting, a global leadership strategy consultancy head-quartered in London. His writing on leadership development, organizational culture, education and training, and strategic diversity and inclusion has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Forbes, and Fast Company. Eric is a member of the Dramatists' Guild of America and lives in Brooklyn, New York.