Nutt, Paul C. 1939-

views updated

NUTT, Paul C. 1939-

PERSONAL: Born September 14, 1939, in Dowagiac, MI; son of Charles E. and Isabel E. (Brigham) Nutt; married Nancy Davis (a realtor), September 9, 1961; children: Suzanne, Lynn-Nicole, Charles. Education: University of Michigan, B.S., M.S., 1963; University of Wisconsin—Madison, Ph.D., 1974.

ADDRESSES: Home—Columbus, OH. Office—644 Fisher Hall, Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University, 2100 Neil Ave., Columbus, OH 43210. E-mail—nutt.1@osu.edu.

CAREER: Fisher College of Business, Ohio State University, Columbus, professor of management sciences, management and human resources, and public policy and management.

AWARDS, HONORS: Academy of Management, Public and Nonprofit Division, Distinguished Book Award, 1994, for Strategic Management of Public and Third Sector Organizations: A Handbook for Leaders; fellow, Decision Sciences Institute, 1999; Academy of Management, Hall of Fame, 2000.

WRITINGS:

Evaluation Concepts and Methods: Shaping Policy for the Health Administrator, revised edition, Luce, 1981.

Making Tough Decisions: Tactics for Improving Managerial Decision Making, Jossey-Bass (San Francisco, CA), 1989.

Managing Planned Change, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1991.

(With Robert W. Backoff) Strategic Management of Public and Third Sector Organizations: A Handbook for Leaders, Jossey-Bass (San Francisco, CA), 1992.

Why Decisions Fail: Avoiding the Blunders and Traps That Lead to Decision Debacles, Berrett-Koehler (San Francisco, CA), 2002.

Contributor of nearly a hundred articles to business and management journals. Member of editorial review board, Academy of Management Review.

SIDELIGHTS: Professor of management sciences at Ohio State University, Paul C. Nutt is an expert in the field of strategic management and decision making. He has produced more than one hundred articles in business and management journals, as well as several books on the subject of management. Over twenty years of research on organizational decisions went into Nutt's 2002 volume, Why Decisions Fail: Avoiding the Blunders and Traps That Lead to Decision Debacles. Out of the more than 400 in his database, Professor Nutt ultimately chose fifteen failed decisions with disastrous outcomes as case studies to reveal a number of traps he discerned in the decision-making process. According to a Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal article about the book, "His research demonstrated that failed decisions share three common blunders: managers rush to judgment, misuse their resources, and repeatedly use failure-prone tactics to make decisions." Library Journal critic Lawrence Maxted commended Nutt for his "thorough dissection of the debacles and explanation of the decision-making process," as well as for "his clear writing style."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Review of Public Administration, September, 1998, John Collins, review of Strategic Management of Public and Third Sector Organizations, p. 312.

Choice, September, 1992, S. Newport, review of Strategic Management of Public and Third Sector Organizations, p. 176; December, 2002, R. Subramanian, review of Why Decisions Fail: Avoiding the Blunders and Traps That Lead to Decision Debacles, p. 672.

Library Journal, August, 2002, Lawrence Maxted, review of Why Decisions Fail, p. 113.

Personnel Psychology, spring, 2003, John W. Fleenor, review of Why Decisions Fail, p. 235.

Publishers Weekly, January 28, 2002, "It's the Stupidity, Stupid," p. 223.

School Administrator, April, 2003, Perry Berkowitz, review of Why Decisions Fail, p. 41.