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The past decade has seen a wealth of research on decision making, yet business executives seem impervious to its lessons. The problem is not that they lack the desire to make better decisions. It's that the bulk of the research does not apply to the kind of decision that's most challenging for them. Decisions vary along two dimensions. The first considers whether the decision maker can influence the terms and the outcome. The second addresses whether the aim is to do well or to do better than others. Before making any decision, the most important thing is to understand what kind it is. Decision research has produced good advice for routine choices and judgments, such as personal investment decisions, where people are choosing among the products before them, have no ability to change them, and are not competing with anyone. For these decisions, research has shown, it's important to avoid common biases. But strategic decisions, such as entering a new market or acquiring another company, are completely different. Executives can actively influence outcomes. Furthermore, success means doing better than rivals. For these decisions, executives need more than an ability to avoid common biases. They require a talent for clear-eyed analysis and the ability to take bold action.

When the name Robert S. McNamara is mentioned, one thought usually springs to mind: the tragedy of Vietnam. But McNamara's career was brilliant long before he served as secretary of defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson-and long after as well. Spanning five decades, it included leading roles in academia (as a professor at Harvard Business School in the early 1940s), private enterprise (as an executive who helped turn around the ailing Ford Motor Company after the war), government (in his seven-year stint at the U.S. Department of Defense), and humanitarian service (as president of the World Bank for more than a decade). In this illuminating essay, Rosenzweig, a professor of strategy and international business at IMD, presents McNamara not only as an idealist and an accomplished manager but as the personification of management itself in his time. In his work we see the evolution of the discipline, from the development of frameworks to make sense of markets and organizations, to the embrace of quantitative analysis in decision making, to the growing understanding of human psychology. Vietnam was a crisis that revealed the limitations of managerial thinking at the time, but McNamara never stopped learning. As the discipline of management continued to evolve, so did he. In the end, his willingness to examine the mistakes of the past and learn from them may be his greatest legacy.