DECISION MAKING
“Strategy is a pattern in a stream of decisions.”
– Henry Mintzberg, Strategy Guru
Decisions are the forks in the road of strategy. Their importance can never be underestimated, for decisions allocate an organization’s precious resources of time, money, and people for the purpose of creating value. In making decisions you better understand the value at stake of going down one path versus another, along with the costs, synergies, and risks.
A decision is a final choice made from a set of options. The strength of a decision is only as strong as the strength of the set of decision choices. While emotions often cloud judgment, strong decision making uses the rational side of our brain, relying on the evaluation of options through an objective lens of criteria. For, the path of decisions forges an organization’s strategic path of action that ultimately decides the fate of the organization.
In this section, I’ll go over the most important decision-making tools of strategic leaders including:
1. Rational Decision Making
2. Opportunity Cost
3. Cost-Benefit Analysis
4. Prioritization Matrix
5. Decision Matrices
6. Governance
7. Negotiation
8. Demand Management
9. Risk Management
Hopefully, over time, these tools will become second nature to you, and help you navigate through sets of options to discover and ultimately make the right decision.
As with all sections on this site, you can pick and choose a topic or if you want a nice overview of a section read the topics in order.
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Offering tons of free and insightful content on Stratechi.com is my passion. Learn more about me, Joe Newsum. I have a unique combination of deep management consulting experience (7+ years at McKinsey & Oliver Wyman) with practical executive experience in a myriad of roles (CEO, COO, CMO, CFO, and more) and in a variety of different types (software, CPG, retail, manufacturing, services) and sizes of companies (startups, midsize, multi-billion).
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