One beauty of a concise book is that you can get smarter in one sitting.

That’s definitely the case with The Conclusion Trap: Four Steps to Better Decisions by Dan Markovitz. It comes in at just shy of 60 pages, but it packs a heckuva punch in one thin volume. His whole point is that we’re all prone to jumping to the wrong conclusions when we’re trying to solve problems, with the result that we waste time, energy, and money.

And we waste them needlessly, he thinks, because of our flawed ways of of reaching those conclusions. In his first chapter, he offers concrete examples of the failed problem-solving, as well as some of the typical patterns that lead to them. In chapter two, he expands on the specifics of those patterns and how things go so spectacularly wrong. And in the last section, he gives us ways to avoid the failures, with specific tools to employ in the real world so we get better at coming to the right conclusions about the causes of our problems, so we can then find the right solutions to eliminate them.

Along the way, Markovitz shares some illuminating stories. Here’s one of my favorites:

[General Motors CEO Roger Smith] would have seen plant managers telling workers to skip quality checks, eliminate planned tool changes, and ignore machining processes that were clearly deteriorating. That’s obviously not a recipe for producing the high-quality cars that customers wanted, and were buying from Japanese companies–but when the performance evaluation system you’ve designed prioritizes meeting production quotas at all costs, well, you can understand why the plant managers kept the lines running. Never mind what that meant for quality…

GM’s problem wasn’t the workers. It was the managers. Or more accurately, it was the management system set up by Smith and other executives…

You can spend $90 billion, but unless you look in the mirror and activate your inner Analyst first, you probably won’t solve the real problem.

And here’s another:

Many executives think they’re going to the crime scene to learn the facts. In actuality, they’re more like a king visiting the serfs.

A leading global financial services company that boasts of its focus on customer service requires executives to visit its call centers so that they can see the customer interactions first-hand. That sounds good in concept, but it doesn’t really work that way. The executives leave their marble-floored, mahogany-lined offices in NY, take the corporate jet to the inexpensive, second-tier locations around the world, and sit through a series of PowerPoint presentations. Then they listen in on a few calls with the best customer service rep, write an obligatory “lessons learned” email, and fly back in time to make dinner in Manhattan.

This is not visiting the crime scene.

Visiting the crime scene is: the former credit card company MBNA requiring all executives to spend four hours a month listening to customer calls. Not only that, they were forbidden to have unlisted home phone numbers–the CEO wanted to make sure executives received the same dinner-time telemarketing phone calls that the company made to ordinary people.

The Conclusion Trap is full of such stories, and equally full of great practical advice on how to avoid the problems it calls out. And it’s not just a quick read, but a good read as well. What’s not to like?