John Wiley & Sons, 278 pages, $43.50

In a speed-driven and competitive world, decision-makers are increasingly faced with tough calls. They have to make choices about complex issues that can have an enormous impact, be it determining whether to launch a new product, buy or sell a company, fire an employee, change careers, or report unethical behaviour.

"Tough calls are high-stakes decisions that must be made when information is ambiguous, values conflict, and experts disagree," J. Keith Murnighan of Northwestern University and John Mowen of Oklahoma State University write in The Art of High-Stakes Decision-Making.

They propose a seven-step process for making those tough calls:

1) Search for signals of threats and opportunities: Some of the worst blunders occur when you fail to pick up signals early enough and recognize problems or opportunities. The impact of high-stakes situations can escalate exponentially over time, and the longer you wait to take action the more difficult it will be to get ahead of the curve.

Because of that, you must learn in advance to set decision-making triggers: How much evidence will you require before taking action? Wait too long, and you can miss a big opportunity. Act too quickly, and you can make a big blunder.

2) Find the causes: You need to systematically search for the cause of the problem or opportunity you face, and identify alternative solutions. Generally, high-stakes problems result from multiple causes, with the interplay difficult to determine. As well, too often decision-makers stop too early in their quest for solutions, picking one of the first few that arise.

3) Evaluate the risks: Determine the likelihood of success if the action is taken. Risk actually comes in six dimensions: monetary; social (how will this hurt my reputation?); information (how much will I learn from the situation?); life or health (could the outcome affect life or health?); experience (will the experience be enjoyable or disagreeable?) and sink-the-boat risk (will the wrong move cause catastrophic, irretrievable loss?).

4) Apply intuition and emotion: Both intellect and emotion are required to make tough calls. When time is short, you may have to rely solely on intuition, since there won't be enough time for a formal decision-making approach. But even when there is time, use intuition as a check against more scientific or computerized decision-making systems.

5) Take different perspectives: By viewing decisions from divergent perspectives, you can develop a better understanding of the situation and improve your chances of success. Among the perspectives you can adopt are: engineering or technology; sales or marketing; production; political; legal; accounting or finance; competitive and ethical.

6) Consider the time frame: Identify the time available for the decision and develop priorities for the tasks that you must accomplish to make a decision. The accuracy of decisions decreases under time pressures because decision-makers increase their information-processing speed but decrease the amount of information they consider; increase the weight they place on negative information; increase their use of simple rather than more complex decision models; lock in and defend their first chosen strategy or are more influenced by emotions, which can interfere with intuition and rational analysis.

7) Solve the problem, by weighing the possible gain -- and the likelihood of getting it -- against the possible risks.