CHAPTER 4-7
                          GOOD JUDGMENT
     A key requirement for good judgment is strength of 
character, according to Max Singer.  Integrity helps keep your 
judgment steady when the situation offers inducements to alter 
your conclusions.  
     A politician or an executive might change her views about 
what should be done according to what she thinks is most 
convenient or profitable either personally or for the political 
party.  A scientist might alter his conclusions according to what 
he thinks might please the funds-granting agency.  Such 
changeableness might seem as if it is good judgment in the short 
run.  And some people can for a lifetime successfully pull off 
this trick of trimming their sails to catch the prevailing winds 
without losing self-respect or career.  But for many people the 
greatest long-run satisfaction comes from doing what you believe 
ought to be done irrespective of short-run personal inducements.      
Character may enable a person to act decisively in a situation 
where others also see the need to act, but the others continue to 
drift without facing up to what must be done.  This is often the 
case with the decision to fire an employee.  Many people shrink 
from that action, and fool themselves that perhaps the situation 
will improve.  In contrast, the person with sound character and 
good judgment recognizes that the sooner the deed is done, the 
better for all. 
     Good judgment may be thought of simply as a collection of 
devices for avoiding the pitfalls that afflict human thinking, or 
more generally, devices for avoiding the pitfalls of life.  But 
no one can excel at all aspects of thinking.  One is unlikely to 
develop to the fullest the laser-like depth of insight of a great 
physicist and at the same time have the breadth of knowledge that 
an outstanding chief executive officer of a major corporation 
draws upon.  In the same way cannot develop every muscle in the 
body sufficiently well to qualify for Mr. America and at the same 
time hone the skills necessary to be a diving champion -- partly 
because of time constraints in training, and partly because there 
may be some mutually-exclusive development among some muscles. 
     Good judgment implies sound balance between depth and 
breadth.  The appropriate balance differs from situation to 
situation.  
     Good judgment in each situation usually includes asking 
questions which are important, and important because they are 
broad and overarching rather than because they are technically 
more advanced.  For example, at a meeting of engineers about how 
a bridge should be constructed, one may hear a person with good 
judgment asking at the end of the meeting -- with good reasons, 
the others agree -- whether the discussion suggests that perhaps 
that bridge should not be built at all.  Or a military officer 
who has good judgment may ask, as the others are deciding on the 
best strategy for retreat, whether unconditional surrender -- 
which had not previously been discussed -- may not be the best 
tactic.  
     In the case of the bridge, asking if it should not be built 
may involve character because a decision against building may 
imply that the engineering firm would lose an important piece of 
business.  In the case of the retreat, suggesting surrender may 
require character because others may consider the suggestion 
traitorous. 
     Having good judgment implies considering all the factors 
that need to be considered, and doing so at all times.  In this 
sense, breadth of knowledge and understanding is the key element 
in good judgment.  Taking into account the forces that come into 
play in the longer run are an important part of good judgment.  
Often this requires taking account of adjustment mechanisms that 
reverse the short-run phenomenon.  For example, an expected 
shortage of a key commodity might allow your firm to raise the 
price greatly and make a killing.  But a person with sound 
judgment would take into account that the public might react with 
anger at what it perceives as exploitation.  That might lead to 
customers leaving you in the future, or even government action to 
fix the price, which would be very costly for you in the long 
run. 
     Taking account of the long-run and indirect effects is 
particularly important for understanding and forecasting the 
course of events in the economy and society as a whole. 
     Good judgment requires steadiness and constancy and an 
absence of lapses, a quality not required in more technical 
roles.  A person serving in a top job responsible for the 
activities of an organization and other individuals must function 
well every day, whereas a scientist or artist who functions 
brilliantly on odd days but gets drunk on even days may be a 
great asset to the organization and to society.       
     This also implies that a person with good judgment must 
avoid being carried away by enthusiasms.  It may even be an 
advantage not to have a copious flow of ideas.  An executive can 
usually obtain satisfactory lists of alternatives from 
subordinates.  One is naturally partial to ideas of one's own.  
Therefore, not having ideas can help avoid unbalanced judgment.  
More generally, separating the task at hand from one's own 
feelings -- keeping ego and fears at bay is especially important 
-- is an important element of good judgment. 
     No one has ever found a way to teach good judgment in any 
field, to my knowledge, other than exposing the student to a wide 
range of cases.  That is the purpose of an intern's training in a 
hospital, and a law student's training in a legal clinic.  
Therefore, my best suggestions to improve your judgment are a) 
obtain a wide range of experience, and b) rehearse the habit of 
asking yourself to check your judgment once more before arriving 
at a decision, asking yourself whether you have done everything 
possible to exert good judgment.  This is why the greatest 
advantage of getting older is improved judgment.  The more years 
you live, the more history you have seen, and the more 
opportunities you have had to see how a complex set of events 
play out, including the inborn propensities of human nature.  
This experience can prevent you falling into pitfalls that 
younger people might fall into -- if you learn from your 
experience, which a big "if" indeed. 
     Understanding the complexities of human nature is one of the 
main contributions of experience.  When you are young, your 
experience with your parents constitutes a large part of the 
experience from which you are likely to generalize.  But your 
parents are a very atypical sample of how people at large will 
behave toward you, partly because they are more likely to have 
your interests at heart than are other people.  As you grow 
older, your experiences with your parents bulk smaller and 
therefore affect your judgment less.  
     An important issue concerns the amount of trust to place in 
a person's word or competence.  Knowing how much faith to place 
in a consultant or in a prospective partner, for example, is a 
crucial aspect of an executive's judgment.  A child has more 
reason to believe a parent than a person at large, because a 
parent is more likely to have the child's welfare at heart than 
does a stranger.  And if a parent promises to protect you from a 
danger, the parent has more at stake than does a stranger, and 
therefore is more reliable.  Hence we expect youth to be more 
credulous than older persons who have had more time to acquire 
wider experience.  Age does not guarantee acuity, however, and 
believing that it does would be an error of judgment. 
     Aside from situations in which a person's good judgment is 
not wanted by others because it threatens a personal loss to 
them, sound and seasoned judgment is a highly prized attribute.  
Indeed, it is the hardest attribute to find when you seek to find 
a person to fill a job.  And when you begin a relationship with a 
doctor or a lawyer -- or a plumber -- you should use all your 
ingenuity to check the person's judgment.  Whether you should 
bring a law suit may be an even more important question than how 
to bring suit, and whether to have surgery more crucial than the 
quality of the surgery itself.  
     The greatest affliction with respect to judgment is the 
belief of most people that they possess it.  This is damaging 
because an important element of good judgment is humility about 
how little one knows.  Perhaps most afflicted by this are shiny 
new graduates in a field like business or law, sure that they are 
up on the latest developments in their field, and bursting with 
energy to wield the tools of their craft that they have been 
honing for the last several years.  The most dangerous are the 
successful ones who have been getting praise for wielding the 
tools well.  They are unaware that the judgmental aspects of law 
practice, say, have barely been discussed at law school.  If you 
do not know what you lack, the lack cannot trouble you, or affect 
your practice. 
     Youths also have not had the traumatic experiences of 
disaster that one inevitably acquires with time, and therefore 
youths may lack prudence.  An older physician may be less likely 
than a younger one to advise surgery because s/he has known 
healthy people to die of anesthesia or complications.  But of 
course this, too, can lead to poor judgment if the older person 
is so fearful that action is overly inhibited.  Certainly it is 
bad judgment to overemphasize risks:  Newspapers and television, 
which see themselves as watchdogs for the public, often do harm 
when they emphasize potential dangers -- about the environment, 
for example -- to the extent that our judgment about change is 
warped. 
     Setting priorities is another test of judgment.  What should 
be done in which order?  Which projects must be sacrificed under 
which conditions?  What are the tradeoffs?  This requires that a 
person have sound intuition about relative values, as discussed 
in Chapter 2-1.
     A difficult judgment is whether to act now versus purchasing 
more information with waiting-time and money.  It is possible to 
make some meaningful calculations of this tricky matter, but 
usually we rely on the decision-maker's intuition.  
     The test of judgment is how often you are right relative to 
how often you are wrong.  This is unlike the case of a scientist 
or artist in their actual work.  What matters for those 
practitioners is not how often they are wrong, but rather how 
many good things they do, because the bad things they do are not 
very costly.  Indeed, one scientist said that the job of a 
scientist is to make mistakes as fast as possible in order to 
save other scientists from having to make those mistakes.  
(Einstein put value on the unfruitful efforts of his last decades 
for just this reason.)  In contrast, bad decisions are costly for 
managers; they matter as much as the good decisions. Of course a 
scientist or artist needs good judgment to choose projects that 
will turn out well, and in this respect they are functioning as 
managers rather than as artisans. 
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