We know a little about judgment in individuals, but the imperative in the modern era is to develop judgment at the organizational level—which is not the same as the sum of individual managers’ judgment. To understand how that might be done, Brook Manville, Larry Prusak, and I are studying big judgment calls that turned out well and how organizations arrived at them.

Throughout history people have marveled in retrospect at the brilliance or stupidity of major decisions. In military battles we see the shrewd strategy or cunning tactic that led to a great victory. On Wall Street we shake our heads in wonder at the trade that called an uptick or a downtick far enough in advance to make a killing. In industry we wonder at the acquisition that failed to work out or the product launch that took the world by storm. Given our traditional assumptions, we tend to assign most of the credit or blame to a leader—the general, the CEO, or the politician—and to center on questions of how astute an individual’s thinking was.

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Publication/Copyright: Harvard Business Review