Good Judgment: Making Better Business Decisions with the Science of Human Personality
Richard Davis
HarperBusiness/An Imprint of HarperCollins (June 2024)
How perceptivity can accelerate personal growth and professional development
As I began to read Good Judgment, I was again reminded of one of Warren Buffett’s observations: “In looking for people to hire, look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.”
According to Richard Davis, perceptivity is “the ability to discern the character of others and reliably predict their behavior on the basis of said character…to read others’ personalities quickly and accurately, overcoming biases and prejudices that might skew [one’s] perception…when making decisions and managing relationships both professional and personal.” Therefore, “Think of perceptivity as a bundle of different skills related to personality. At its core, perceptivity is the ability to understand and name personality traits, recognize them in others and oneself, infer how traits affect behavior, and make good decisions as a result of this knowledge.”
Thesde are among the passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to indicate the nature and extent of Davis’s coverage:
o Emotional Intelligence: How Intelligent Is It Really? (Pages 5-15)
o A Deeper Way to Understand People (15-18)
o Perceptivity and Performance (21-27)
o The Rise of the “Big Five” (35-41)
o The Big Five as an Interpretative Framework or Blueprint (45-48)
o A Practical Blueprint for Judging Character (49-59)
o Your New Superpower (58-68)
o Strategy #1: Build Rapport and Get Them Talking (65-68)
o Strategy #2: Get Them to Glance Backward (69-72)
o Strategy #3: Ask Power Questions (72-78)
o Strategy #4: Paint a Mental Picture (78-83)
o Strategy #5: Calibrate and Refine Your Hypothesis (83-88)
o Create a Success Profile (99-103)
o The Deep Dive Interview (107-115)
o Going Deep on People (118-120)
o Crafting a User’s Manual (126-130)
o Resolving Conflicts with Partnership Road Maps (133-136)
o Improving Performance (142-147)
o A Personality Cheat Sheet (180-185)
o Putting It All Together (190-194)
Davis immediately establishes a direct and personal rapport with his reader in the Introduction. Many others will no doubt share my reaction: I felt as if he wrote Good Judgment especially for me. Readers will also appreciate Davis’s brilliant use of a set of “Key Insights” at the conclusion of each chapter.
With regard to the title, good judgment is obviously essential to successful recruitment, interviews, hiring, performance evaluation, and onboarding as well as to countless other situations unrelated to the workplace.
I agree with Richard Davis: “Good judgment isn’t what you [may] think. It entails understanding the full spectrum of who we are as individuals, not just our fleedting emotional life. [Hence] the importance of developing, disciplining, and honing our powes of social observation and interpretation.”
In Good Judgment , he thoroughly explains HOW to do that.
* * *
Here are two suggestions while you are reading this book: First, highlight key passages Also, perhaps in a lined notebook kept near-at- hand, record your comments, questions, action steps (preferably with deadlines), page references, and lessons you have learned as well as your responses to key points posed within the narrative. Also record your responses to specific or major issues or questions addressed, especially the aforementioned “Key Insights” at the conclusion of chapters.
These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will facilitate, indeed expedite frequent reviews of key material later.