Make better decisions with fewer choices.

Why would a book by a psychologist be useful to a metalcaster or supplier? For one thing, Business Week editors thought "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less," by Barry Schwartz, was a "Top 10 Book of the Year." Depending on your individual responsibilities and pressures, one of the following six reasons also may pique your interest:

* If your job is to communicate with employees, win their loyalty and motivate them to maximize their contribution to your business, this book offers insights on how to achieve both goals.

* If you sell to customers, this book will show you the surprising thought processes many buyers use to arrive at the decisions they make (or perpetually postpone).

* If you market your organization to specific industry segments or the government, this book will illustrate the unexpected ways people react to opportunities that are presented to them.

* If family problems distract you from your work, this book will illustrate how "the paradox of choice" impacts your family life.

* If your career in management, production, R&D, customer service or human resources includes significant frustration, rejection or stress, some of your problems will be traceable, directly or indirectly, to the paradox of choice.

* If you are a business strategist looking for ways to think outside the proverbial restricting box, this book introduces conceptual tools that will help you reframe problems in ways that can open doors to fresh solutions.

The main value of this book is that it will significantly improve your understanding of peoples' decision making behaviors--and that's valuable to any executive. What you may have thought of as a fairly straightforward process, in Schwartz's analysis, proves to be quite complicated and daunting, yet full of opportunities for the thoughtful exec who finds ways to put his new understanding to work.

The book's big idea is that too many choices mean that informed decisions require major, often paralyzing, effort. In addition, more choices mean more chances to make a mistake. And even when people don't make mistakes, they are consistently less satisfied with their decision when they had to arrive at it after wading through a thicket of choices.

There are so many fascinating examples of self-delusion, misperception and wrong-headed analysis made on a mass scale by normal people, one wonders how the human race has progressed as far as it has.

One example is the extent to which people lend credence to anecdotal information. Let's say a competitor passes on to one of your prospects a credible-sounding rumor about the poor quality of your process. Research shows that there is a normal human tendency to give great weight to this personally delivered, anecdotal report. The existence of a critical mass of published data to the contrary will usually carry less weight in the mind of a decision-maker than a juicy, vivid rumor. This is scary because an anecdote can damage sales despite its untruth or inaccuracy.

For our second example, let's turn to another study the author references. This research shows that when people were asked to rank the causes of death, they ranked death by accidents of all types to be equal in numbers to deaths from diseases of all types. Why would they believe that? In fact, diseases are responsible for 16 times as many deaths annually as accidents. This same group thought that the number of murder victims was on a par with stroke victims. Schwartz reports that we are 11 times more likely to die from a stroke than homicide.

What can account for these misperceptions? Researchers found that in a study of newspaper articles, an almost perfect correlation existed between the frequency of stories about murders and death by accidents and the respondents' estimates of those factors as causes of death. In other words, people believe accidents cause as many deaths as disease because they hear about accidents more frequently than they hear about death from disease.

The net effect of these and dozens of additional examples should be to raise awareness among business leaders of the need to shape the perceptions of customers and prospects. If you are not telling your own story, regularly and credibly, the combination of silence and the self-serving communication of others can distort the market's perception of your company in extremely inaccurate ways.

William J. Libby, Libby Communications, Ridgefield, Connecticut