Strategic Decision Making: A Best Practice Blueprint(CBI Fast Track)

Good decision making is crucial to good management and successful strategic planning. Sadly the decision making capabilities within organisations are often poor. Using a fascinating and very readable combination of psychological theory, pencil-and-paper thought problems, and material from contemporary media, George Wright demonstrates why high-profile strategic disasters occur and how to prevent your own organisation from making similar mistakes. Case studies include Marks & Spencer, Dyson, Baring's Bank and the Millennium Dome.

Table of Contents:
Series Foreword by Digby Jones ix About the author xi Preface xiii Acknowledgements xv 1 Challenging Routines 1 Success formulas 3 Frames of reference 4 2 Decision Making in Management Teams 15 Groupthink 17 Alleviating groupthink 25 3 Overcoming Overconfidence 29 Overconfidence 30 Confirmation bias 32 Hindsight bias 33 Expert predictions 33 Alleviating overconfidence 39 4 How to Think with Scenarios 43 Scenario planning 44 Scenario construction: the extreme World method 45 Using scenarios in decision making 49 Scenario construction: the driving-forces method 55 The benefits of scenario planning 62 5 Dealing with Decision Dilemmas 73 Avoiding difficult decisions 74 Case study of a management team facing a decision dilemma 76 Dealing with psychological reactions to difficult decisions 80 6 Expectation and Decision Making 85 Decision trees 86 Blame culture and risk taking 93 7 How to Make Trade-offs 105 Simplifying choices can result in poor decisions 106 Making trade offs 113 8 Harnessing the Minds of Managers 121 Strategy development 122 A technique for the facilitation of strategic thinking 123 The role of the facilitator 124 Lessons from this book 126 Notes 131 Appendix A 137 Appendix B 138 Appendix C 139 Index 141

About the Author :
George Wright has held Faculty positions at LBS and Leeds Business School, and is currently at Strathclyde Graduate School of Business, where he consults to major blue-chip clients such as Philips and IBM. He has conducted extensive research into the role of judgement in forecasting and decision making, with particular emphasis on the simplification strategies of managers which lead to poor decisions. He has published both academic and trade books on forecasting and decision making, and contributed to various journals within the field. He founded the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making with Wiley in 1988 and is Associate Editor of the Wiley journal Journal of Forecasting and the journal International Journal of Forecasting.

Review :
"..this series has much to commend it..." (Modern Management, February 2002)  "…a fascinating and readable combination of psychological theory, paper and pencil thought problems and quotations from contemporary media…" (Productivity Digest, May 2002)