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.

John Caddell at The Marketing Strategy & Innovation Blog pointed us to a WSJ Insight article “Leading from Below,” which raises some interesting points and questions about leadership in organizations.

The WSJ piece states that “Change will have to come from those leading from below, rather than relying on leadership from the top.” However, “Their day-to-day responsibilities can be all-consuming, leaving no time or energy for the effort to expand their influence.”

The ways to foster “bottom-up” leadership in an organization, according to to the authors, include things like:

- Thinking about your org chart horizontally.

- Encouraging a broader, longer-term perspective among subordinates.

- Create vacuums rather than imposing solutions.

- Encouraging questions without answers.

Caddell believes the question comes down to collaboration/collective leadership or individual leadership. Or possibly a mix.

I agree that establishing a culture that fosters leadership from below requires strong leadership at the top that’s willing to then relinquish some control and instill trust. But in order for those within the organization to assume their leadership roles, collaborative tools and technology are required to empower individuals to assert leadership. The distributive nature of modern organizations requires it.

Do modern organizations need to foster leadership from below in order to stay relevant, competitive, and innovative in today’s ever-changing, distributed environment? If so, how?

Intuition is the matrix in which human lives are compiled. Somehow it seems to emerge in our brain, capable of providing insight without thought, judgment without knowledge, and clarity amidst a bewildering array of inputs. It doesn’t always get a lot of respect, though. People who are basically intuitive thinkers can be embarrassed by the mushiness of it all, and subsequently veil themselves in analysis, claiming to have an objective basis for their reasoning.

Deductive thinking is actually the exception in human interactions. And a good thing too. For the most part deduction is slow, riddled with cognitive biases, and when it deals with human existence ‘deductive’ information is derived using our intuitive senseWe the people, rely on a set of very simple systems to interact with the world. We use simple pattern recognition and humans are amazingly good at pattern recognition (you’re doing a pretty decent job of it reading for example). Our brains automatically keep count of everything for comparative purposes (if you don’t believe that you’ve never spent the afternoon with two five-year olds). Research even has shown that we have an almost innate sense for fairness.

Now it’s not entirely clear that all the tuition in the world gets you better intuition. Experience and education are necessary ingredients for certain sophistication of mind, but they are by no means sufficient for better intuition to arise. Intelligence, while helpful, is not the primary determinant either. Not only that, intuition, unlike deductive skills is a ‘concrete’ rather than ‘abstract’ skill. Meaning, that it generally doesn’t transfer from one situation to another. So, if you’re great at betting on the ponies it doesn’t say anything about your skill at other betting games.

Coming Up Next: How to educate your business intuition

I’ve been dreaming of an elevator pitch to explain to people that I design decision software for a living. Let’s just summarize those efforts by saying that I have failed. This would be OK if I was just responsible for designing decision software. Problem is, I’m also responsible for marketing it.

At the heart of the matter is lack of context. My pitch needs to a) convincingly establish decision making as an important skill you can learn, b) something that software can assist with, and c) that decision making is separate from the content of the decision (i.e., that knowing something about decisions in general, can help someone with a particular decision). And the pitch needs to be completed in about the same amount of time that it took you to read this paragraph.

Now the above might be possible, if it wasn’t for that ‘convincingly’ part. ‘Convinced’ is not what people feel like when you tell them: “I can help you make better decisions.” And the more successful the person you are talking to is, the more you sound like a desparate huckster who’s been hitting the sauce, and who is trying to hood-wink you out of hard-earned cash.

Now let’s assume that we come up with this highly compressed spew of words that convinces others that: “Yes this guy is onto something– people around me make stupid decisions all the time.” Now I’m like 10% of the way there. The next 90%  requires me to convince the poor schlepp that a) it will not take more time than what he’s currently doing, and b) that is boss can understand it.

So, the best I’ve come up with so far is this:

I make software. Pretty simple Internet-based stuff that helps you and your team organize and prioritize your thoughts. You know, dig into your brain and verbalize your goals and objectives. The software then takes all the brainiacs with the spreadsheets, and the marketing people with the Powerpoints and the engineers with their diagrams and crunches it together. On a good day, people who use our stuff actually make informed decisions. On bad days their boss decides what to do based on an article from an in-flight magazine.

Either way, they make decisions.

Question: What would you do as the head of a company who’s decades-old product has suddenly seen a significant revival in interest among a whole new generation of users? How would you respond if over a half a million people became actively engaged in playing an online version of your game if it wasn’t you that developed and deployed the game? How would you capitalize on this sudden, exciting trend and convert this unexpected spike in interest into new sales and branding opportunities? C’mon, your dusty old product is hip again!

Here’s the wrong answer: You’d demand that it be shut it down and alienate a significant number of potential customers. It looks like Hasbro’s following through with their demand that Facebook take down Scrabulous, one of the only things keeping me coming back to Facebook. If Hasbro is really out to simply shut down Scrabulous, this is very short-sighted. Does the desire to protect intellectual property trump all business opportunities? Do you protect the brand at all costs and maintain sales status-quo, or embrace the new online paradigms and exploit the opportunities they present?

It appears that Hasbro is letting the lawyers make the decisions. Its hardly a stretch to assume that this “online” revival of Scrabble interest will lead to increased “offline” sales of the game, yet the company is losing goodwill with this new potential customer base by yanking their game. Does Scrabulous represent IP infringement? Without a doubt. But there are better ways Hasbro could proceed.

First, get the lawyers out of the room. We all know what the legal infringements are and the precedent set by allowing it to continue unabated, and we don’t need these issues clouding the real opportunities. Next, keep Scrabulous up and look to assume the rights to the game while continuing to cultivate new fans. I’d even offer the makers of Scrabulous leadership marketing and online game development positions. I can’t imagine a better resume than Scrabulous – they’ve done a hell of a job. Imagine what they might do in revitalizing other games in Hasbro’s portfolio.

Is this going to be a turning point for Hasbro that revitalizes their portfolio of brands in the Internet age, or are they going to hunker down behind a legal wall made of brick and mortar?

UPDATE: Technomarketer has some great advice for how Hasbro should have proceeded (and still can). We agree on getting the lawyers out of the marketing department. Lawyers and marketers rarely mix well.

What are managers and business execs rewarded for? We expect them to make decisions — we even may recognize that decision making is their fundamental role. But what are they rewarded for? Senior managers at oil companies are not responsible for the increase in the price of oil, right? But we still think it’s reasonable that they share directly in that windfall profit their companies are now experiencing. Likewise, how often are prudent, well thought out, brilliantly executed decisions rewarded for having been good decisions? Probably not often enough. At the end of the day we reward results. Look at the home loan fiasco. Easy now to say that sub-prime loans were a bad idea. But a lot of people made good numbers and profit for a period of time — they have already been rewarded and walked away with the bonuses for bone-headed lending ideas. Do you think that the people cleaning the mess up now will not be rewarded as well..?

So is this then the decision makers dilemma: Decisions don’t matter, only the luck of the draw, and the execution of the team you inherited will give that short term reward that companies care about?

If you are reading this, odds are you are torn. You really think that decisions matter, you really think that an awful lot of people just don’t understand the importance of decision making. But, at the same time, you look around and see a lot of people be successful on top of dubious decision making. This my friend is a cognitive bias — something decision sciences are well aware of. Actually it’s a number of biases. The first is fundamental misattribution error, the idea that other people make excuses while you have sound reasons for your behavior. The second bias is base-rate-fallacy, that’s using anecdotal data that’s easy to find instead of true analytics that are hard to find. A third could be confirmation bias, basically you are searching for data to prove what you already believe. For a more comprehensive list of decision biases check out this Wikipedia entry.

Really, if you look at it more carefully, you will find that people who think about their decisions do much better on average, and do much better overall. Bill Gates, whatever his critics say about him, understood his customers, understood his software, and understood the dynamics of the market place. (OK, the paperclip was a bad idea, poorly conceived and horribly implemented I grant you that). Another successful guy is Warren Buffet. His buy and hold philosophy is not exactly a grip-and-rip-it approach. Jack Welch, not afraid to make the hard decisions the center piece of his management approach.

This may not help you make better decisions. But hopefully it will make you want to make better decisions.

Stay tuned.

Welcome to Decision World.

 Decision World has a simple goal: to become the Internet gathering place where people can share their insights and thoughts on decisions.  We plan to have space for academic thinking, as well as corporate practices, and government experiences.  Our hope is to find young people making their first important personal and professional decisions, and people who, if no longer young, are still finding new challenges and opportunities in their lives.

Decisions happen.  Some are good, some are bad.  Our hope is that a meeting place like Decision World can make the decisions that happen a little better.

andri
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With this blog, Andri and I (along with many to come) hope to explore real-life and theoretical concepts in decision-making and collaboration. Andri and I have had some very interesting conversations, and we came to the conclusion that we should take these conversations to the blogosphere. We hope to build a conversation about how we make personal decisions regarding things like careers and college, as well as decisions and collaboration within the enterprise. What tools can be used? What processes work best? What pitfalls exist that lead to bad decisions?

Andri’s an expert in decision-making. I’m not. I hope that this signals where we want DecisionWorld to go. We’ll be adding regular and guest contributors, and we aim to strike the right balance of academic and layman, theoretical and practical. I’m involved in leading a new web start-up, and there’s lots of decisions to be made. If you think about it, making decisions is the most important role of an executive, and often the most difficult or mystifying. This holds true in life as well.

Onward!