180 Posts Found

Psychologists have identified more than 60 cognitive biases that affect how people make decisions. We boiled them down into four groups: group think; confirmation bias; loss aversion, which leads us to put more weight on losses than gains; and anchoring or inertia—anchoring decisions in what we did in the past.

Content: Quotation | Author: Tim Koller | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior

Munger’s success was built on a system for decision-making—not a classical investment philosophy, but rather a mental discipline underpinning one. We outline four ideas strategists can learn from Munger to think more clearly in turbulent times.

Content: Article | Author: Martin Reeves | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

The strategy, purpose, and values discussions—what Kevin Sharer, the former CEO of Amgen, calls a company’s “social architecture”—have often felt like separate exercises, but they now need to work in concert. “If you don’t have a social architecture that’s solid, well-accepted, and can be operationalized against the most important decisions you make, that’s leadership’s fault,” said Sharer.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Adam Bryant, Kevin Sharer | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Decision Making, Goals, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior, Strategy, Values

Decision makers can satisfice either by finding optimum solutions for a simplified world, or by finding satisfactory solutions for a more realistic world.

Content: Quotation | Author: Herbert Simon | Source: Management and Business Review (MBR) | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior

At large corporations, making decisions is often not a matter of getting somebody to say yes, it’s getting nobody to say no.

Content: Quotation | Author: Sara Clemens | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior

The key thing that leads people to feel like companies are slowing down is when decisions don’t get made, when there is an opportunity or an issue and it just drifts on. Not knowing who can make a decision is the curse of large organizations.

Content: Quotation | Author: Sara Clemens | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior

Understanding how and why people think the way they do will help you with everything from customer service to evaluating mergers and strategic initiatives. Takeaways from a life of study.

Content: Article | Author: Jonathan Byrnes | Source: Chief Executive | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

As you consider a past decision as a team, think about what you knew before you made it. What was revealed after the fact? Could you have known about it beforehand?

We tend to only review decisions that are associated with bad outcomes, like missing a sales target by 10%. But when you exceed that same target by 10%, there’s no meeting, no post-mortem. Just congratulations … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Annie Duke | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

To make great decisions, you need accountability, repeatability, and examinability. I always describe it like this: We need to create an evidentiary record, a way to Google our own decision-making.

Content: Quotation | Author: Annie Duke | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

Executives who confront new challenges with old formulas often fail. The best leaders tailor their approach, recalibrating their “action orientation” to address the problem at hand, says Ryan Raffaelli. He details three action orientations and how leaders can harness them.

Content: Article | Authors: Ben Rand, Ryan Raffaelli | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Decision Making, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

[Don’t] treat all decisions uniformly. I think the most obvious axis to break them down on are degree of reversibility and magnitude. Things with low reversibility and great impact and magnitude, those ones you do want to really deliberate over and try to get right.

Content: Quotation | Author: Patrick Collison | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

Divide decisions into one-way versus two-way door decisions. Two-way door decisions are those that are relatively easy to undo. Both Bezos and Branson argue that we shouldn’t waste a lot of time deliberating and debating such decisions, but rather try them out and then roll them back if needed. Two-way door decisions are great opportunities for learning. In contrast, one-way door decisions are those that … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Mark Mortensen | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior

Five lessons in five minutes: Professor Szu-chi Huang on how humans make decisions and get motivated.

Content: Article | Authors: Kelsey Doyle, Szu-chi Huang | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior

I propose that there are two key parameters that an organization needs to put in place to guide decision-making. The first is the organization’s clearly communicated strategy. This is defined by the difficult choices leadership has made that determine which decisions are “strategic” (and should be undertaken only by top management) and which decisions are “operational” (and can be undertaken by employees). The second parameter … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Constantinos C. Markides | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior

We tend to respond to what’s presented to us. It takes extra effort to stop and ask, “What’s missing?” Our energy-conscious brains like to be efficient. The problem is that not having all of the information we need can lead us to make a poor decision.

Content: Quotation | Author: Eric McNulty | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

Your skill in decision-making is directly proportional to your quality of information acquisition. So, how good are you at making decisions? How good are you at acquiring information?

Content: Quotation | Author: Tobi Lütke | Subjects: Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

In the real world, there is no such thing as making the right decision. You make the decision and then make the decision right.

Content: Quotation | Author: Baba Shiv | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior

Reflection doesn’t take anything away from decisiveness, from being a person of action. In fact, it generates the inner toughness that you need to be an effective person of action — to be a leader. Think of leadership as the sum of two vectors: competence (your specialty, your skills, your know-how) and authenticity (your identity, your character, your attitude). When companies and people get stuck, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Koestenbaum | Subjects: Decision Making, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

For the past couple of years, Annie Duke has been sharing her advice with founders and angel investors in closed sessions for the First Round community, but given our focus on open-sourcing so others in the tech ecosystem can learn, we thought readers of The Review would be curious to see a few pages from her decision-making playbook, tailored specifically for the startup context.

In this … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Annie Duke | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

As individuals, we focus way too much on one decision versus another, but not nearly enough on the meta question of the context that would cause that decision to change.

Content: Quotation | Author: Rick Song | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior