Decision Management: How to Assure Better Decisions in Your Company

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Why do the people in some companies continually dazzle us with their brilliant decisions while those in others make one blunder after another? Do they understand their businesses better? Are they just plain smarter? Or is it all a matter of luck? The answer, says J. Frank Yates, is none of the above. The real key, rarely recognized, is how the leaders manage the company's decision processes—the leaders' decision management practices. Drawing on his thirty years of research and experience as well as scholarship from psychology, economics, statistics, strategy, medicine, and other fields to explain the fundamental nature of business decision problems, Yates highlights the ten cardinal decision issues crucial to managing the decision-making process—and ultimately better company decisions. He covers problems ranging from recognizing whether a decision is actually called for to assuring that a preferred course of action will be implemented. He shows how solid decisions result when managers ensure that deciders resolve every cardinal issue effectively for every decision problem facing the company. He also reveals how, conversely, chronically poor decisions are traceable to managers allowing—or even creating—conditions that encourage deciders to fall short in how they address at least one of those critical issues.

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J. Frank Yates is professor of business administration and marketing at the University of Michigan Business School. An award-winning teacher, for over two decades he has taught decision making at UMBS and as a visiting professor abroad, including at Peking University, Leiden University, and the University of Tokyo. Yates is the associate editor of the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making and a past president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. He writes extensively on decision topics and has been on the editorial boards of numerous journals that publish key developments in decision research, including Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, the Journal of Applied Psychology, and Medical Decision Making.