The Thinking Manager's Toolbox

This book is an excellent primer on decision-making and problem-solving. It is especially relevant to those who normally rely on intuitive processes and fail to recognize the value that can be added by a formal decision process. The author makes a great case for the use of more formal processes and backs it up with his own experiences with business decisions.When I read The Thinking Managers' Toolbox, the innovative framework (the organization of the toolbox) jumped out at me. The author's years of experience in helping people and organizations make decisions and solve problems shines in his presentation of a method to choose the right tool for the right problem. But the author goes beyond the organization of the toolbox into a lucid presentation of some of the tools that have worked well over the years. The author explains these tools in a readable manner that can enable the reader to apply them almost immediately.Great book! A must read for anyone who makes decisions or who has problems (if you can read this you're included).

If you would like to see people actually solve problems together, then get this book and use the techniques Bill Altier describes. As a consultant who uses the tools described here, I can verify that they work. The thrill never ceases to watch a group of diverse people - from different groups and levels of an organization - learn that they can, in fact, work together, that among them they have the knowledge and creativity to solve problems and develop strategies.For people who are resistant to have a team attack a problem because meetings are unproductive, this book will show you that it is the way the meeting is run that is not productive. It is the thinking process that gets the result, whether for an individual or a group, and this book shows how much better that result can be from a group.This is not a "light-reading" pleasure book, but it is well worth the effort. It gives a great deal of detail on why and how the tools work and how to apply them. If you are willing to wade in and try these techniques, you will be surprised at how much better at problem solving both you and your people are. They may even find they like working together.

I read this book and walked away with new ideas that can be used immediately. The book challenges traditional thought and gives solutions for us to use. As a manager, I find that extremely helpful.If you're interested in improving your managerial & leadership skills, recommend books by Blanchard & also "The Leader's Guide: 15 Essential Skills."

This book is an excellent tool for any manager or management consultant. The examples are terrific, and the presentation is as logical as the processes covered in the book. Users of Bill Altier's approach and tools will benefit greatly from the higher quality thinking that they produce.

Meetings are the bane and lifeblood of managers everywhere. Vitally important, they are also frustratingly ineffective. Like the old story of the blind men and the elephant, meetings are usually more of a political contest among competing pet ideas than a cooperative effort among people with differing perspectives and relevant information. The usual diagnosis of this situation is that it's a "people problem." Thus, we have sent millions of individuals to interpersonal-skills training, communication-skills training and dealing-with-difficult-people training. We've sent thousands of groups off on retreat to rappel down rock faces and fall blindfolded into their colleague's arms. We've fielded an army of specialized facilitators to say, "Thank you for sharing that," and "Suzie, we've haven't heard from you, yet." But the treatment hasn't worked. Meetings still stink. And the things meetings are supposed to produce--decisions, plans, and solutions--have not improved either. In this important book, Altier approaches the problem from a completely different perspective. He argues that the fundamental problem with meetings is their lack of a disciplined, organized process for joint thinking. Focusing on decisions, plans and solutions as the key outputs created by managers, Altier describes in detail three separate, structured processes that remake meetings devoted to these ends. The process for solving problems is my favorite. Using a real but disguised example, Altier shows what a structured, disciplined thinking process can accomplish. Engineers had spent three months twisting knobs and replacing parts in series of failed efforts to solve a serious but intermittent manufacturing problem. Yet 20 hours of disciplined analysis by the same people found the cause, just by thinking together in a different way. At one point, I was so engrossed in the story, I darn near failed to get off my train at my stop. As this example makes clear, this is no theoretical book, but a practical guide grounded in real world experience. The benefit of Altier's deep experience with these processes is evident in his cautions about places where participants or meeting leaders can intentionally or unintentionally sabotage them, his recommendations about ways to keep them practical and result-focused, and his discussions of ways to avoid their contamination by our usual fuzzy thinking in the form of implicit, unwarranted assumptions about the nature of the task or problem. While there have been hundreds of academic books hawking "decision science" and similar nostrums, Altier's book is unique in bringing structured thinking processes together with the reality that meetings are filled with intelligent people with egos. It's also unique in allowing scope for hunch and gut feel to serve the process without taking it over. Altier's approaches have been honed by over 20 years of experience leading real people in real situations