Decision Making In A Week

The ability to make the right decision is crucial to anyone who wants to advance their career. Written by Martin Manser, a leading expert on decision making in a business context, this book quickly teaches you the insider secrets you need to know to in order to choose the right path. The highly motivational 'in a week' structure of the book provides seven straightforward chapters explaining the key points, and at the end there are optional questions to ensure you have taken it all in. There are also cartoons and diagrams throughout, to help make this book a more enjoyable and effective learning experience. So what are you waiting for? Let this book put you on the fast track to success!

Making decisions just got easier You make decisions all the time in everyday life: what to eat, what clothes to wear, with whom you spend your leisure time and how you spend your money. In your business life you are also constantly making decisions: the different activities you - and your business colleagues - need to carry out in order to arrive at a sound decision. At work, you are deciding how to spend your time, which emails to answer, what subjects to raise at a meeting, when is the best time for your company to launch a new product, what companies you should invest in, what you are not willing to compromise on in negotiations, what policies to develop and how best to market your products and services. Some of these decisions may have already been made for you by other colleagues, usually those above you in your company or organization, and your task is merely to implement them. In other matters, however, you can exercise some control over the actual decision-making process. Each of the seven chapters in Decision Making In A Week covers a different aspect of the decision-making process: - Sunday: Know your aims clearly. What are you actually making a decision about? - Monday: Collect relevant information. Consider all the relevant factors as you gather the information you need. - Tuesday: Identify different options. Widen your thinking, challenge assumptions and consider creative solutions. - Wednesday: Work effectively as a team. Make decisions as a group so that colleagues will feel motivated to implement the decision. - Thursday: Evaluate different options. Set objective criteria against which you can examine the various options you have identified. - Friday: Make an informed decision and implement it, communicating it well to all the relevant parties. - Saturday: Review the decision carefully, evaluating the whole decision-making process, noting what went well and learning from mistakes.

What are you really missing out on? You're home on a Friday night, scrolling through Instagram, ready to go to bed. You see pictures on your timeline of a party you were invited to, but didn't go to. You were confident when you said no, but now you can't stop thinking about it, and you start feeling worse. You have FOMO, or, Fear of Missing Out. Coined in a Harvard Business School article, FOMO has become a global term to describe the decimating anxiety when thinking other people are having better, more fulfilling, experiences than you are. It's a natural, biological response, but that doesn't make it feel any better. Amplified by the rise of social media, #FOMO has become a cultural crisis—so what's the cure? Patrick McGinnis, creator of the term FOMO, has been thinking about it for seventeen years—and he has a solution: decision-making. Learning to weigh the costs and benefits of your choices, prioritizing your decisions, and listening to your gut are central to silencing FOMO and its lesser-known cousin, FOBO: Fear of a Better Option. After all, don't you want to feel comfortable and confident in your decisions? Written with self-evaluations throughout the book, Fear of Missing Out: Practical Decision Making in a World of Overwhelming Choice helps you ascertain and eliminate the parts of your life that are causing more anxiety than happiness. So give this a read, and then go to that party, start that new book, create a new goal—or don't. Make that decision, and be confident in it: it's the first of many of its kind.

In the ever-changing world of business, we've arrived at a point where process has trumped culture, where the race toward efficiency has left us unable to reach our potential. Stuck in the land of status quo, we've forgotten how to think. The very structures put in place to help businesses grow are now holding us back;; it's time to Kill the Company. This book is a call to arms: to start a revolution in how we think and work. But instead of more one-size-fits-all change initiatives forced upon employees, we need to embrace small changes that create ripple effects throughout the organization. Lisa Bodell urges companies to move from "Zombies, Inc." to "Think, Inc." Thinking can no longer be exclusive to the creative team or lead strategists. A culture of curiosity must be fostered among the ranks to shake up our standard practices, from unproductive meetings to go-nowhere strategic planning. This revolution can and will awaken our ability to think, and ultimately, to innovate and grow.

Developed from the authors’ longstanding course on decision and risk analysis, Value-Added Decision Making for Managers explores the important interaction between decisions and management action and clarifies the barriers to rational decision making. The authors analyze strengths and weaknesses of the best alternatives, enabling decision makers to improve on these alternatives by adding value and reducing risk. The core of the text addresses decisions that involve selecting the best alternative from diverse choices. The decisions include buying a car, picking a supplier or home contractor, selecting a technology, picking a location for a manufacturing plant or sports stadium, hiring an employee or selecting among job offers, deciding on the size of a sales force, making a late design change, and sourcing to emerging markets. The book also covers more complex decisions arising in negotiations, strategy, and ethics that involve multiple dimensions simultaneously. Numerous activities interspersed throughout the text highlight real-world situations, helping readers see how the concepts presented can be used in their own work environment or personal life. Each chapter also includes discussion questions and references. Web Resource The book’s website at http://ise.wayne.edu/research/decision.php offers tutorials of Logical Decisions software for multi-objective decisions and Precision Tree software for probabilistic decisions. Directions for downloading student versions of the DecisionTools Suite and Logical Decisions software can be found in the appendices. Password-protected PowerPoint presentations for each chapter and solutions to all of the numeric examples are available for instructors.