The Washington Post explores the decision by the Department of Defense to punt (i.e. not make a decision) regarding awarding the $35 billion air tanker contract and leave it to the next administration. The seven-year process of not making a decision has included an ethics scandal involving Boeing and the controversy around Northrop’s involvement of EADS, a European firm.

FastCompany presents “The Courage to Make a Decision.

Jeff Cornwall explores ambiguity and “seemingly irresolvable dilemmas” in decision-making.

Rob from Coconut Headsets has created a new blog, Money and Minds: A blog about personal neurofinance where he will focus on how the brain affects financial decisions.

MSNBC posts an article on their own decision to pull Keith Olberman and Chris Matthews from their anchor positions on election coverage going forward.

ESPN has posted the 10 Worst Coaching Decisions Ever Made.

From turning down the Beatles to failing to recognize Microsoft’s potential, there have been some seriously bad decisions made in the business world. Neatorama has reprinted The Stupidest Business Decisions in History.

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Some people made decisions that led to the world best discoveries while others thought we couldn’t “drill into the ground to find oil”. “Bad Quotes for Famous People” (courtesy of The Univerisity of Western Ontario) demonstrates how ingrained biases can lead to a failure to recognize potential.

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People make decisions and very often second guess themselves. Here is an article from The Huffington Post on “How To Be Satified With Your Decisions“.

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“When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.”  ~William James

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“The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.”  ~David Russell

Nicole Gelinasn in The Wall Street Journal explores “The Rise of The Mortgage Walkers” – those that choose to simply walk away from their homes and mortgages and hand the keys back to the bank. The take-away: This may be the most rational choice many have and doing so is the smart thing to do.

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Rob May writes at BusinessPundit on how he struggles with blogging from a skeptical perspective and his wariness of current memes, such as Wisdom of Crowds and Google-worship. The fact is that group think and herd mentality can lead to disastrous decisions. The contrarian position is a healthy one, Rob. Keep it up. (Here, Rob also explores metacognition and its relevance in understanding your thought processes and exploring issues and decision-making at a deeper level)

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Here, Irwin Lazar at CollaborationLoop explores the decision by Yahoo to reject Microsoft’s bid, and the myriad of possibilities such a combination would have on the collaboration market. The New York Times has Yahoo chief Jerry Yang’s explanation of the rebuff.

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The New York Times explores the Art of Persuasion.

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Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld lists his rules for life, politics, and business here. One recommendation for business is to decentralize and move decision-making down and out in the organization. Hat Tip: Andrew at How To Get Better Business Ideas.

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BusinessPundit has revisited a few old gems from the past, including 1) this post from 2004 on introverts, extroverts, and decision-making in the organization, and 2) this post about a novel method of writing down each decision and the desired outcomes to improve decision-making over time.

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Rob May of Coconut Headsets explores how Too Much Information Can Lead to Worse Decisions, where he touches on Representative bias and “the dangers of scenario analysis in business.”

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And our own Andri Haraldsson explores why the US election process is the wrong way to decide who’s going to be president, with a link to a very insightful historical piece by by Lord James Bryce on why great men aren’t elected President.

In “The Case Against Case Studies,” in BusinessWeek, Geoff Gloekler, who covers business education issues, explores how some are addressing the lack of decision-making skills in recent graduates. R. Glenn Hubbard, Dean of the Columbia Business School, has introduced a twist on the traditional case study, one that has less than perfect information for students to work with. It is a response to criticism such as that from Henry Kravis of the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, who said:

“I want to see MBAs who can jump in and make decisions, not jump in and learn to make decisions.”

Columbia is creating decision briefs that dispense with the Harvard Business School case study format, which often contains too much information and follows a predictable formula. The new format takes the students through the decision process.

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SupplyChainer.Com’s Top Trends for 2008 says that spending for Collaborative Decision Environments will accelerate and software investments will focus on process improvements rather than automating tasks.

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Rob May at Coconut Headsets and formerly of BusinessPundit, writes about deciding on the right business tools (even decision-making tools).

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Melanie Turek at Collaboration Loop believes that while real-time, unified communication (UC) collaboration tools in the enterprise are valuable, the real meat is in asynchronous collaboration in todays distributed environments.

Also at Collaboration Loop, Irwin Lazar provides a primer on Getting Started with a Collaboration Architecture, where he walks through the process from setting goals, identifying constraints, end-user and compliance requirements, and implementation and architecture.

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Nick (The Decision Strategist) has a nice concise list of Decision Making Techniques. And, for good measure, here’s his list of Decision Making Errors.

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The Enterprise Decision Management Blog has some great posts on what’s happening in the world of the enterprise, including guest blogger James Taylor’s take on Dale Wolf’s post titled “9 Steps to a Valued, Differentiated and Consistently Delivered Customer Experience,” where he applies it to Enterprise Decision Management.