02/21/2017 10:26 AM Posted by: SDP

SDP Fellows favorite books to give a client

Survey responses on favorite book for a client

In December, we reported on the results of a survey of SDP Fellows’ favorite books overall, and favorite for someone just learning DA. Here, we continue with the Fellows favorite books to give to a client.

Favorite book to give to a client:

A wide variety of books received mention. There was no runaway winner, but four books rose to the top of the voting. The most votes went to:

• Why Can’t You Just Give Me the Number? (Leach)

Just behind that were:

• Smart Choices (Hammond et al)
• Handbook of Decision Analysis (Parnell et al)
• Decision Quality (Spetzler et al)

A few of the Fellows provided more nuanced responses depending on the audience. Some examples:

Larry Neal - "There are two distinct groups for me here, people making business decisions and people making life decisions and the recommendation is different for each. Business decisions: ‘Why Can’t You Just Give Me The number?’ by Leach. Life decisions: ‘Smart Choices' by Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa”.

Karen Jenni – "Here I'm far more likely to give someone a paper on an application similar to their problem than to give them a book. If I gave them a book it would probably be Smart Choices”.

In the last of this series, next time we’ll cover the Fellows' choices for best book for their own use.

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