Eyes Wide Open

If you make the wrong choice when it comes to your morning coffee, one of up to 10,000 trivial decisions we make every single day, it doesn’t matter very much. But if you make the wrong choice in a high-stakes situation, if you pick the wrong surgeon or put your trust in the wrong financial advisor, if you choose the wrong partner or are swayed by the wrong advice of a colleague, the consequences could be disastrous.

In Eyes Wide Open: How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World (HarperBusiness; $26.99; Hardcover), bestselling author and decision making authority Professor Noreena Hertz explains how to make better choices and smarter decisions in our personal and professional lives while navigating this age of information overload.

Studies show that after checking an email, we take an average of 22 minutes to get back to what we were doing at our original level of concentration. And that when bombarded by phone calls, texts and emails, our IQ falls by a disturbing 10 points. But regardless of how distracted we are, how much data swirls around us, and how unpredictable our world is today, we still have to make decisions constantly. And this cacophony doesn’t just impair our judgment; it’s also exhausting us and keeping us in a constant state of hormone-induced stress.

Cutting through the noise, Hertz advocates that for the sake of our health, our wealth, and our future security, we need to take a radically different approach to our decision-making process. Filled with practical suggestions and actionable advice, insights from sources as diverse as Hollywood Moguls and NASA scientists, and inspired by her own personal journey when six years ago she became very sick and had to make high stakes decisions for herself, as well as the latest research, this step-by-step guide reveals how to get better at collecting, filtering, and analyzing information, get smarter at establishing who to trust and whose recommendations to follow, get more confident at challenging authority, and get more adept at soliciting divergent opinions and evaluating diverse options. Hertz also illustrates how our emotions, feelings, moods, and memories affect our choices and points out the insidious ways our fast-paced environment is messing with our minds.

Throughout this game-changing book, the ideas of which were first mooted in her wildly popular 2011 Ted talk on the subject, Hertz shares findings, explores ideas, and offers insights including:

• Why it’s smart to be skeptical about experts and their pronouncements; and how to identify the best amongst them.
• Why you can’t assume that your doctor understands your test results, and how to make sense of these yourself.
• Why it’s crucial to carve out time to think even in times of crisis: If President Obama can find room in his schedule, and the best ER doctors can take a pause, so too can you. 
• Why we can’t use the past as too fixed a steer and why we shouldn’t assume tomorrow will look like today-—lessons from Nokia and Harry Potter.
• Why, as a boss, you really don’t want to surround yourself with yes-men; why you do want to hire a Challenger in Chief, preferably who doesn’t look like you; and how to tap into the wisdom throughout your organization. 
• How to regulate your emotional thermostat—and why if you want to make smart decisions, you need to.
• Why looking at information in black and white rather than in color can lead to better decisions; and why you need to be much more probing of that PowerPoint presentation. 
• How to brush up on statistics and figure out what probabilities, risk assessments, and test results actually mean before you can decide what action to take.
• How social media and online forums can be a huge asset to your decision-making… as long as you understand their pitfalls.

Modern life is too complex for a one-size-fits-all decision-making template that can work for everyone at all times. Instead, the ultimate goal of Eyes Wide Open is to empower readers to become confident, independent, and wise decision-makers, and Noreena Hertz provides the tools, takeaways, and strategies for us to achieve this.

ABOUT NOREENA HERTZ

Noreena Hertz is a decision-making guru who advises some of the leading politicians and CEOs in the world on economics and geopolitics. Her internationally best-selling books, The Silent Takeover and I.O.U.: The Debt Threat and Why We Must Defuse It, have been translated into 18 languages. The Observer has named her “one of the world’s leading thinkers.” Vogue calls her “one of the world’s most inspiring women,” the Guardian has identified her as “one of the top British Public Intellectuals.” Noreena’s latest book, Eyes Wide Open: How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World was published by HarperCollins in September 2013.

Hertz is a sought after broadcaster and commentator and regularly appears on flagship television programmes globally including BBC and CNN. She has been interviewed on shows like Charlie Rose and Hard Talk, and her work has been the subject of three broadcast documentaries. Her op-ed pieces have been published in such places as The Financial Times, The Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and The Washington Post.

Noreena is also an accomplished speaker and has provided keynote addresses at such forums as TED and the World Economic Forum. She regularly speaks at major corporate events all over the world. Noreena advises major multinational corporations, CEOs, NGOs and politicians, as well as start-up companies, and sits on various corporate and charitable boards. She played an influential role in the development of (RED), an innovative commercial model to raise money for people with AIDS in Africa, having inspired Bono (co-founder of the project) with her writings.

Professor Hertz is based at University College London.