Over the past ten years, there has been growing interest in the process of strategic decision-making among both managers and researchers. Strategic decisions are important for five main reasons: They are large-scale, risky and hard to reverse; they are a bridge between deliberate and emerging strategies; they can be a major source of organizational learning; they play an important part in the development of individual managers and they cut accross functions and academic disciplines. Strategic Decisions summarizes the current state of the art in research on strategic decision-making, with chapters prepared by leading strategy researchers. The editors also present implications for current application and proposed directions for future research.
Strategic Decision Making provides an effective, formal methodology that provides help with decision making problems, especially strategic ones with high stakes involving human perceptions and judgements. Focusing on applying the AHP to decision-making problems, Strategic Decision Making covers problems in the realms of business, defence and governance. Using case studies drawn from years of experience, the book discusses decision making for real life problems and includes many worked examples and solutions to problems throughout. The reader will gain comprehensive exposure to the extent of assistance that a formal methodology, such as AHP, can provide to the decision maker in evolving decisions in complex and varied domains.
Making strategic decisions is a fundamental skill for leaders and managers. However, in a business environment that is in a constant state of change, making strategic decisions has never been more difficult. Strategic Decision Making addresses this challenge by providing a framework that can be used to make sound decisions in an uncertain world. Structured around the core concepts of framing, experimenting and scaling, this book will ensure that efforts are focused where the need is greatest, that interventions are tested, evaluated and revised if necessary and that successful initiatives are effectively rolled out across the business. Packed with real world examples and backed up by academic research, Strategic Decision Making will allow today's leaders and the leaders of tomorrow to make successful and defensible business choices. It shows how to: avoid decision-making bias, overcome organizational inertia, manage the difficulties of rigid organizational structures and avoid being side tracked by outdated or irrelevant experience. Essential reading for business practitioners and management students alike, this comprehensive guide provides a robust approach to achieving strategic success.
verwhelmed and paralyzed by your choices? Learn how to get it right the first time - improve your analysis, judgment, and intuition. Unfortunately, you can't just rely on your gut instinct or "hunch" when you make decisions. There's a science to improving your critical thinking, weighing pros and cons, and avoiding the traps that take you down the wrong path. Make smart decisions by catching your brain's built-in flaws. The Art of Strategic Decision-Making will teach you to seize control of your life and make sure your decisions aren't making you. This book cites years of research and scientific studies about what constitutes a great decision and the factors that will inevitably lead you there. It is an in-depth look at human nature and psychology and why we make decisions in the way we do - for better or for worse. This book is packed with theory, but it is all practical and actionable. Use these mental models and pieces of analysis on your decisions TODAY. Think more quickly and more thoroughly - at the same time. Peter Hollins has studied psychology and the human condition for over a dozen years. This book contains tactics pulled from his personal experience, as well as some of the most famous studies in decision theory and social psychology to help you make snap decisions. Beat analysis paralysis and eliminate indecision. -Learn your subconscious motivations, needs, and desires that hijack your brain. -Discover the surprising causes and cures for decision fatigue. -Over 10 of the most dangerous cognitive biases and decision traps. -How to make your pros and cons lists incredibly useful and illuminating. -The 6 Hats Method of intelligent decisions and how you can inhabit different perspectives. -The WRAP method of planning for failure in decisions. -How to think outside the box and creatively solve problems.
This open access book clarifies confusions of strategy that have existed for nearly 40 years through the core thoughts of three fundamental elements. Unlike the traditional definition of strategy as "a plan to achieve a long-term goal from overall considerations”in a linear view, this book defines strategy from non-linear viewpoint as it is in the real world. The art of a strategy lies not only in the determination of development goals, but also in the identification of development problems and putting forward overall guiding ideology of solving problems. Rich illustrations as well as numerous business and military cases are presented in helping readers to understand the fundamental elements of strategy.The general scope of the book includes introductions to the three fundamental elements of strategy, three-sub decisions of a complete strategic decision, incomplete strategies, relationship between tactic and strategy, three elements of competitive and corporative strategies. There may be biases in company-level, real strategic decision-making which makes a complete strategy not necessarily a perfect one. The book introduces biases and reasons for the biases, helping industrial strategic decision-makers understand the importance of knowing the nature of the company, the industry and its environment. In addition, this book also presents principles and evaluation approaches of strategic decisions, explores the reasons for the excessive definitions of the strategy concept, and discusses directions of future’s research tasks.The book will benefit business managers who are interested in knowing what a complete strategic decision is and how to avoid errors or biases in strategic decision-making. It also benefits students in business schools (especially in MBA/EMBA programs) who are (or will be) on executive positions. Academic researchers may find it is interesting to understand strategy from the view of the three elements. The new view provides a novel insight into strategy and promotes several research directions in the future. The three elements of strategy are also applicable to military strategies and readers who are interested in military and may find its value as well.
The complete understanding of organizational culture and personal values is fundamental for running and improving modern organizations. By identifying the underlying building blocks for behavior, strategy, and actions of organizations and their members, companies and researchers may discover innovative techniques to encourage productive and satisfying working environments. Recent Advances in the Roles of Cultural and Personal Values in Organizational Behavior is a collection of innovative research on how culture and personal values shape and influence leadership styles, decision-making processes, innovativeness, and other management practices. While highlighting topics including employee motivation, leadership style, and organizational culture, this book is ideally designed for managers, executives, human resources professionals, recruiters, researchers, academics, educators, and students seeking current research on cultural backgrounds and personal values for organizations.
The effectiveness of a good strategy well implemented determines a business' future success or failure. Yet history is full of strategic decisions, big and small, that were ill-conceived, poorly organized and consequently disastrous. This updated guide looks at the whole process of strategic decision-making, from vision, forecasting, and resource allocation, through to implementation and innovation. Strategy is about understanding where you are now, where you are heading and how you will get there. There is no room for timidity or confusion. Although the CEO and the board decide a company's overall direction, it is the managers at all levels of the organization who will determine how the vision can be transformed into action. In short, everyone is involved in strategy. But getting it right involves difficult choices: which customers to target, what products to offer, and the best way to keep costs low and service high. And constantly changing business conditions inevitably bring risks. Even after business strategy has been developed, a company must remain nimble and alert to change, and view strategy as an ongoing and evolving process. The message of this guide is simple: strategy matters, and getting it right is fundamental to business success.
For anyone faced with the challenge of making strategic decisions, this book will show readers how to choose the strategic models best suited to their needs.
Turbulence is not new to the business world. In fact, turbulence is increasing, and managers are seeing teams spinning their wheels. Management systems are in a state of crisis and operations are more complex. The old top-down operations mode no longer suffices. Today's businesses demand speed and increased accuracy, forcing everyone to re-evaluate chains of command and tear down the walls between functions. Amid the responsibilities of traditional management lies problem solving. The push is toward moving decision-making authority down the ladder to all levels. Managers are no longer equipped to or capable of making the number and variety of necessary decisions in a vacuum. The current mode is to have employees deal directly with workplace issues and take corrective action without complaint and without management involvement. Coping with this reality and preparation for these improvements in workplace problem solving requires interest and motivation. Strategic Decision Making for Successful Planning can facilitate this by demystifying and simplifying the process. The book bridges philosophy and theory and puts together a practical integration of all the tools necessary to get results from your investment of time, energy, and money. What is unique about this book is while it's based on a strong academic foundation, it does not get bogged down in the human-planning or psychological process of solving problems. It doesn't provide "pie-in-the-sky" creative solutions or a five-year process for solving problems and planning for the future. Numerous techniques and tools are included to make the book the right balance between practical and academic. The book also includes an extensive case study to illustrate points made in the text.
Behavioral strategy continues to attract increasing research interest within the broader field of strategic management. Research in behavioral strategy has clear scope for development in tandem with such traditional streams of strategy research that involve economics, markets, resources, and technology. The key roles of psychology, organizational behavior, and behavioral decision making in the theory and practice of strategy have yet to be comprehensively grasped. Given that strategic thinking and strategic decision making are importantly concerned with human cognition, human decisions, and human behavior, it makes eminent sense to bring some balance in the strategy field by complementing the extant emphasis on the “objective’ economics-based view with substantive attention to the “subjective” individual-oriented perspective. This calls for more focused inquiries into the role and nature of the individual strategy actors, and their cognitions and behaviors, in the strategy research enterprise. For the purposes of this book series, behavioral strategy would be broadly construed as covering all aspects of the role of the strategy maker in the entire strategy field. The scholarship relating to behavioral strategy is widely believed to be dispersed in diverse literatures. These existing contributions that relate to behavioral strategy within the overall field of strategy has been known and perhaps valued by most scholars all along, but were not adequately appreciated or brought together as a coherent sub-field or as a distinct perspective of strategy. This book series on Research in Behavioral Strategy will cover the essential progress made thus far in this admittedly fragmented literature and elaborate upon fruitful streams of scholarship. More importantly, the book series will focus on providing a robust and comprehensive forum for the growing scholarship in behavioral strategy. In particular, the volumes in the series will cover new views of interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks and models (dealing with all behavioral aspects), significant practical problems of strategy formulation, implementation, and evaluation, and emerging areas of inquiry. The series will also include comprehensive empirical studies of selected segments of business, economic, industrial, government, and non-profit activities with potential for wider application of behavioral strategy. Through the ongoing release of focused topical titles, this book series will seek to disseminate theoretical insights and practical management information that will enable interested professionals to gain a rigorous and comprehensive understanding of the subject of behavioral strategy. Decision Making in Behavioral Strategy contains contributions by leading scholars in the field of behavioral strategy research. The 10 chapters in this volume cover a number of significant issues relating to the decision making processes, practices, and perspectives in the field of behavioral strategy, covering diverse topics such as failures in acquisitions, entrepreneurs under ambiguity, metacognition, neural correlates of emotion, knowledge flows, behavioral responses, business modeling, and alliance capability. The chapters include empirical as well as conceptual treatments of the selected topics, and collectively present a wide-ranging review of the noteworthy research perspectives on decision making in behavioral strategy.
