When we make decisions, we make mistakes. We all know this from personal experience, of course. But in case we didn't, a stream of experimental evidence in recent years has documented the human penchant for error. This line of research is probably best known for its offshoot, behavioral economics. Its practitioners have played a major role in business, government, and financial markets. But that isn't the only useful way to think about making decisions. The academic arena alone contains two other distinct schools of thought, one of which has a formal name--decision analysis--and the other of which can be characterized as demonstrating that we humans aren't as dumb as we look. Each school of thought brings vital insights to bear. Managers need to understand when to make decisions formally, when to make them by the seat of their pants, and when to blend those approaches. This article briefly tells the story of where the three schools arose and how they have interacted, beginning with the explosion of interest in the field during and after World War II and continuing to the present day, when companies such as Chevron have hundreds of decision analysts on staff. Its aim is to make readers more-informed consumers of decision advice--which in turn should make them better decision makers.

Managers and academics often lament that Wall Street's short-term focus makes it impossible for corporations to plan for the long run. Palmisano disagrees. Yes, there are some on Wall Street, such as the sell-side analysts who dominate quarterly earnings conference calls, who can't see more than a few months out. But CEOs shouldn't participate in those calls anyway, he believes. They should instead focus their energies on the institutional investors who will embrace the long view if they are given ways to judge a company's progress. In this edited interview with one of HBR's executive editors, Palmisano describes how IBM's top management made significant changes to how the firm set goals and communicated them to investors. "The model," a rolling multiyear road map for earnings growth and cash generation, included an emphasis on R&D investment even during downturns, a plan for execution that involved every unit in the organization, and a shift toward long-term compensation. Transparency and open dialogues with large shareholders were also key. The CEO is a steward, Palmisano argues, charged with protecting a company and its returns for decades to come. But that vision need not clash with success on the visible horizon; during Palmisano's tenure, IBM's stock price soared.

For decades, the basic idea that governed economic thinking was that markets work: The right price will always find a buyer and a seller, and millions of buyers and sellers are far better than a few government officials at determining the right price. But then came the Great Recession, when the global financial system seemed on the verge of collapse--as did prevailing notions about how the economic and financial world is supposed to function. The author has followed academic economics and finance as a journalist since the mid-1990s. To him, three shifts in thinking stand out: (1) Macroeconomists are realizing that it was a mistake to pay so little attention to finance. (2) Financial economists are beginning to wrestle with some of the broader consequences of what they've learned over the years about market misbehavior. (3) Economists' extremely influential grip on a key component of the economic world--the corporation--may be loosening. In the early 1930s, he concludes, policy errors by governments and central banks turned a financial crisis into a global economic disaster. In 2008 the financial shock was at least as big, but the reaction was smarter and the economic fallout less severe.

Executives complain, with justification, that meddling and second-guessing from shareholders are making it ever harder for them to do their jobs effectively. Shareholders complain, with justification, of executives who pocket staggering paychecks while delivering mediocre results. Boards are stuck in the middle--and under increasing pressure to act as watchdogs and disciplinarians despite evidence that they're more effective as friendly advisers. Over many years shareholders have gained power but been frustrated by the results. Could the problem lie with them? Perhaps they aren't really suited to being corporate bosses. Their role, write the authors, has been to provide money, information, and discipline. But established corporations tend to finance investments out of retained earnings or borrowed money. Furthermore, high-frequency traders now account for as much as 70% of daily volume on the NYSE. As for information, shareholders communicate through stock prices--but human nature dictates that we pay more attention to simple recent signals than to complex long-run trends. And shareholders have only two major disciplinary tools at their disposal: selling their shares and casting their votes. But institutional investors, which own the lion's share of stock and have widely diversified portfolios, find it difficult to focus on the governance and performance of any one company. Fixing corporate governance, the authors conclude, must be about finding roles for other actors in the corporate equation who can assume some of the burden of providing money, information, and especially discipline.

Gross domestic product has long been the chief measure of national success. But there's been a lot of talk lately about changing that, from economists and world leaders alike. GDP is under siege for three main reasons. First, it is flawed even on its own terms: It misses lots of economic activity (unpaid household work, for example) and, as a single-number representation of vast, complex systems, is inevitably skewed. Second, it fails to account for economic and environmental sustainability. And third, readily available alternative measures may reflect well-being far better, by taking into account factors such as educational achievement, health, and life expectancy. HBR's Justin Fox surveys historical and current views on how to assess national progress, from Jeremy Bentham to Robert Kennedy to Nicolas Sarkozy. He also looks at where we may be headed. The biggest success so far in the campaign to supplant or at least supplement GDP, he finds, is the UN's Human Development Index--on which the United States has never claimed the top spot.

In 1977 John Mackey moved into a vegetarian co-op, became its food buyer, and went to work in a natural foods store, putting him on the path to founding Whole Foods. An iconic brand, Whole Foods dominates natural-foods retailing in the United States. Mackey talked to HBR about how top management functions at the company (decisions are made by consensus), his sustainable seafood initiative, and what he means by "conscious capitalism." Among other things, conscious capitalism recognizes the stakeholder model, whereby customers, employees, investors, suppliers, larger communities, and the environment are all interdependent. Conscious leadership and a conscious company culture-which allows the organization to fulfill its higher purpose-are important ingredients as well. Part of Whole Foods' higher purpose is realized through the Whole Planet Foundation, which has set up microlending organizations in the communities where the company actually trades. "Nothing we've ever done in our history has created more goodwill with our team members than that," Mackey says.