Kevin HoffbergHe teaches leaders how to make a good decision, and how to know one when they see it.

Most people judge a decision by how it turned out. Kevin has spent much of his career showing leaders why that is a trap. Results depend on luck and on choices other people make. The thinking is the part you control, so it is the part worth getting right. In his own words, “It is the only thing over which you have complete control and for which you can take credit.”

He co-founded DQI and, in partnership with Clint Korver, later his colleague at Ulu Ventures, made decision quality his discipline. Working with leading academics in decision analysis, DQI became one of the first firms to teach those principles to executives with no technical training, and to make a business of it.

The flagship was Decision Quality Leadership, executive training in how to make, and cause others to make, high-quality decisions when the ground keeps moving. By Kevin’s account it was the first commercially successful programme to teach decision analysis to business leaders, and major financial institutions put their people through it.

He built decision systems and tools for one of the largest retail banks in North America and one of the world’s largest credit card lenders. He turned the same methods on strategy, product launches and the hard question of what to sell. He even put them into a venture-funded online company, DecisionStreet, which built industrial-grade decision tools for people facing hard choices in their own lives.

Kevin says he has written hundreds of thousands of words on subjects he never expected to know when he was young. The decision work sits at the centre. Decision Owner’s Manual, which he co-wrote, is a detailed guide to executive decision-making, used inside training and advisory assignments. Decision Quality Leadership, self-published and now in its fourth edition, is about how to make, and cause others to make, high-quality decisions.

With Clint Korver he wrote Leadership and Decision Making, a long paper that uses Ernest Shackleton’s voyage on the Endurance to draw a sharp line between heroism and good decision-making. Academics around the world ask to use it in their classes.

On the customer side he wrote Firing Up the Customer with Brent Frei and Kevin Corcoran while at Onyx, built on worldwide research into what drives a branded customer experience. It reached the Amazon catalogue although it was never printed. His paper Selecting a Go-to-Market Strategy is widely referenced, and he has written and spoken often for the Strategic Account Management Association, including a keynote built on his piece Tell Me a Story.

Kevin goes back a long way with Group Partners. He spent seven years working with it as part of its Expert Network, then joined the company as a director and became its Managing Director in the US, in a role built around Structured Visual Thinking and solving complex business problems. Now he is back in the network.

Home is Vashon Island in the Salish Sea, where he farms at Blue Moon Farms and takes the boat to town when the work needs him. He writes steadily about how people think, from mental models and thinking traps to reciprocity and Walt Whitman.

He admits he has not worked out how to retire. On his own site he puts it plainly: “My curiosity, restlessness, and deeply grooved sense that I only exist if I’m doing something keep badgering at me.”