Effective Decision Making for Business Leaders

• Business Development Academy

Decisions have consequences. The decisions you make will determine the success of your career. Your company’s performance is a reflection of the decisions you make.

Executives are required to make high-stakes decisions with little time for deliberation. The resulting pressure and time constraints are often accompanied by inadequate information—often the information at their disposal is insufficient, biased, or too much to digest.

The difficulty in making intelligent decisions is compounded by the need to render decisions that meet the organization’s near-term tactical objectives, longer-term strategic goals, placate various constituencies, engender broad support and can be practically implemented. Unfortunately, half of all decisions fail with results negatively impacting market opportunities, employee and customer relationships and bottom–line financial performance.

This course will introduce you to specific procedures put in place by some of the most successful companies--such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Xerox, IBM, General Electric, Google, Intel, Staples, EMC, Medtronic, Kleiner Perkins and CVS—to optimize decision making.

Points of Discussion for Seminar:

This unique seminar presents numerous exercises for the attendees to practice the methodologies discussed. The following are among the issues to be discussed:

* Debunking myths about decision making
* Encouraging staff to bring you their problems – you can’t solve problems that you don’t know exist
* Composition of the decision making team
* How to stimulate constructive conflict and debate
* How to get organizations to share information so that better decisions can be made
* Defining the issues at hand – which issues are problems, which are opportunities
* Averting groupthink
* Immunizing yourself against persuasive people, presentations and arguments
* Building up a resistance to the presentation of dubious claims, facts, statistics, and probabilities
* Developing a process for decision making that will engender respect for the decisions produced
* Knowing when to trust your gut instinct and when not to
* Executing your decisions
* Measuring the success and improvement in your decision making

Specific decision making strategies and tactics to be discussed include:

* Decision rights
* Harnessing collective intelligence, predictive markets
* Multi-attribute utility theory
* Contending with sunk-costs
* Multi-voting techniques
* Opportunity cost decision making
* Creating and using decision trees
* Rumor contests
* Rating decision makers
* Devil’s Advocacy

Cost : $995