Backup of Business Magazine Decision Making Harvard Business Review Jan 2006.pdf

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DECISION MAKING >> FROM THE EDITOR
Did You Ever Have to
Make Up Your Mind?
baseball player is a superstar Harvard Business School’s David Gar-
A if he makes the right decision at vin, asks why some people and groups
the plate a third of the time. A neuro- can’t ever seem to make decisions
surgeon had better be correct nearly well. Garvin’s colleague Max Bazer-
always. For managers, the margin for man has long studied the phenome-
error falls somewhere in between. non of bounded awareness–a quirk of
William Jovanovich once told me that cognition that leads us, time and
a person who was right 51% of the time again, to base decisions on too narrow
could rise – as Jovanovich did – from a worldview. In “Decisions Without
being a textbook salesman to being Blinders,” he and doctoral candidate
the CEO of a Fortune 500 publisher. Dolly Chugh explain how to avoid
And, of course, the number of correct these self-set traps. Babson College’s
decisions a person makes often mat- Tom Davenport, meanwhile, describes
ters less than the relative value of those decisions. the formidable decision-making style panies that
Decisions are the essence of management. They’re what petitive advantage out of analytics.
managers do–sit around all day making (or avoiding) deci- Good decision making depends foremost on accounta-
sions. Managers are judged on the es, and most of bility. Whose decision is it? That’s the subject of a knowing
them – most of us – have only the foggiest idea how we do and practical article called “Who Has the D?” by Bain con-
what we do. After-the-fact accounts of a decision are almost sultants Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko. I daresay that any
always fictive rationalizations. This same “retrospective co- organization that uses the authors’ method to clarify deci-
herence,” as a friend calls it, is seen in group decisions. In sion rights will be better managed as a result.
panies, consultants Michael