If you work with early career professionals, my colleagues at

HPR have a great new podcast for you. It's called New Here. Think of it like the

Young Professional's Guide to Building a Meaningful Career on your own terms.

Share New Here with the Young Professionals in your life. a meaningful career on your own terms.

Share new here with the young professionals in your life.

Listen for free wherever you got your podcasts.

Just search new here. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review.

I'm Justin Fox, and I spoke a few days ago in Palo Alto

with Ronald Howard, a professor of management science

and engineering at Stanford University, and man who half a century ago coined

the term decision analysis. Ron, welcome to Ideacast.

Pleasure to be here. So it's 1964 where did this decision analysis come from?

Well it came from my being out here at Stanford for a sabbatical year away from MIT, which was my academic home at the time.

And I had an opportunity during that year, I was primarily writing a book, I had an opportunity during that year, I was primarily writing a book, but had an opportunity to give a course on statistical decision theory at the GE Nuclear Plant in San Jose.

They built the nuclear power reactors.

And so for a couple of hours, one day a week,

I went down there and started teaching this course.

Well, what happened was after the first three weeks of doing this

and was a course primarily based on the academic theory of decision making.

One of the people in the course, one of the engineers,

said, you know, we have a major decision to make.

Could we use what you're talking about to actually make a decision like that? And I said, well, why not? And let's try it. So for several months, we worked on this decision, which was whether to put a super heater on their nuclear power reactor.

...