Coming soon · Book Profile
The Decision Book: Fifty Models for Strategic Thinking
A compact workbook of fifty visual decision-making models drawn from business, psychology, and philosophy that help you structure complexity and make better choices about yourself, others, and the world.
A profile of this book is on the way.
What it’s about
The Decision Book distills fifty of the best-known and lesser-known strategic-thinking models into a hands-on workbook you can fill in, cross out, and adapt. Organized around four practical aims—improving yourself, understanding yourself better, understanding others better, and improving others—it gives you tools like the Eisenhower matrix, SWOT, the flow model, cognitive bias checklists, the prisoner's dilemma, and situational leadership. Rather than handing you answers, each model asks questions and reduces the complexity of a situation so you can concentrate on what matters. Whether you're preparing a presentation, running a performance review, choosing a partner, or reassessing a business idea, this book turns vague chaos into structured, visual, decidable problems.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- A busy professional or thoughtful individual who must constantly make decisions—big and small—and wants a reliable way to structure, analyze, and act on them.
- The problem
- Facing chaotic, complex, and ambiguous choices without a clear method to weigh options and decide. Feeling overwhelmed, indecisive, doubtful, and afraid of making the wrong choice.
- The plan
- Pick the entry point that fits you—trial-and-error (improve yourself) or theory-first (understand yourself).
- Choose a model that matches your question: efficiency, self-knowledge, understanding others, or leading others.
- Copy out and fill in the model with your real situation, treating it as a set of questions.
- Interpret the visual result, decide promptly, and communicate the decision.
- Later, compare expectations with outcomes and revise using feedback and double-loop learning.
- The payoff
- You work more efficiently, decide faster and more confidently, know your strengths, and understand and lead others well while staying responsible for your own values.
See our guide
- Agriculture, Fishing & Forestry Leader →
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- Construction Leader →
- HR Business Partner →
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- Law Firm Leader →
- Maintenance & Repair Leader →
- Professional Services Firm Leader →
- Recruiter / Talent Acquisition →
- Recruiter / Talent Acquisition →
- Recruiter / Talent Acquisition →
- Transportation & Logistics Leader →
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Additional reading
- Diseases of Workers · Bernardo Ramazzini
Cited as the foundational text of occupational medicine, written in the early 1700s, which describes many occupationally related diseases observed in farm patients that are still recognized today.
- The Triple Bottom Line · Andrew Savitz
Introduces the concept of sustainability resting on three pillars: profit, planet, and people. The book uses this to argue that the 'people' component (human capital/worker health) is often dangerously neglected in agriculture.
- The Omnivore's Dilemma · Michael Pollan
Referenced as an example of popular literature that reflects and advocates for the rising consumer voice and public scrutiny concerning sustainable food systems, which is a major trend impacting modern agriculture.
- Silent Spring · Rachel Carson
Cited as the landmark 1962 book that launched the modern environmental movement and fundamentally shifted public and governmental attention toward the potential harms of pesticides, shaping decades of regulation and risk perception.
- Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies · Charles Perrow
The book's theory of 'system accidents' and 'tight coupling' is used by Gonzales to explain how cascading failures, like the Mount Hood climbing disaster, are inevitable features of certain complex systems.
- The Emotional Brain & The Synaptic Self · Joseph LeDoux
LeDoux's neuroscience research on the amygdala's role in fear and memory forms the scientific backbone of Gonzales's argument about how emotion can hijack reason in a crisis.
- The Survivor Personality · Al Siebert
Gonzales cites Siebert's psychological research on the traits of survivors, such as their use of playfulness and humor to stay in contact with reality and manage threats.
- Touching the Void · Joe Simpson
This book provides one of the primary and most detailed case studies Gonzales analyzes to illustrate the psychology of a survivor, including managing pain, using patterns, and the will to live.
- Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea · Steven Callahan
Callahan's story serves as a textbook example of the ideal survivor mindset in action, demonstrating nearly all of the '12 Rules' Gonzales outlines, such as maintaining routine, finding beauty, and surrendering without giving up.
- All Quiet on the Western Front · Erich Maria Remarque
Gonzales quotes Remarque's novel to illustrate the development of instinctual, life-saving secondary emotions in soldiers, a key concept in how experience rewires the brain for survival.