Book details

  • Genre:business & economics
  • Sub-genre:Management
  • Language:English
  • Series Title:Digital Master
  • Series Number:13
  • Pages:200
  • eBook ISBN:9781483593050

Decision Master

The Art and Science of Decision Making

By Pearl Zhu

Overview


Both businesses and the world become over-complex, hyper-connected, extremely uncertain and ambiguous than ever, making effective decisions is both art and science. There are blind spots block the vision and there are pitfalls on the way. Decision Masters refer to the digital leaders or professionals who can leverage multidimensional thought processes, information and intuition, take a step-wise scenario for making effective decisions consistently. Decision Masters also refer to the businesses or organizations that follow a set of well-defined principles, leverage fine-tuned decision processes, efficient information management system, decision frameworks, tools, and metrics to enable people across the organization making effective decisions collaboratively. Decision-making is both art and science. More specifically, what are the digital philosophy, principles, and practices to improve decision-making effectiveness and increase the overall business responsiveness and maturity? The art of decision making includes the art of questioning: Part of the problem in decision ineffectiveness has to do with how you frame the question. Inappropriate framing is being the root cause of most bad decisions. It’s also due to the lack of inquisitive minds. People need to leverage both critical thinking and creative thinking to ask tough questions for framing the real issues behind decision making. The thinking approach being used is informed at some level on subjective and intuitive sources of information, but it is calibrated and employed in the structured guiding process that gets everyone to slow down and think through the implications of their intuitive and subjective assumptions. The decisions should be made based on a sound basis, mixing feelings and reflection, inner wisdom and self-regulation; and make sure decisions are being taken neither impulsively nor too late. Because decision is all about future, and uncertainty is one of the biggest pitfalls to any business transform
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Description


“Decision Master” is the guidebook to perceive digital mindsets with multidimensional decision intelligence, define a set of decision-making principles, articulate potential pitfalls in decision-making scenario, describe digital decision-making styles, summarize the important elements in building the decision-making capability and taking stepwise steps to achieve decision maturity. Chapter 1 Decision Intelligence: Intelligence has been defined in several ways. First, intelligence is a cognitive process involving rational and abstract thinking. Second, it is goal-directed and purposeful, and it means that all intelligent activities such as decision-making, are planned to reach a self-determined goal. Finally, it involves social competence to help individuals adjust to their environmental surroundings. It is important to make sound decisions via leveraging multidimensional intelligence. Chapter 2 Decision-Making Principles: One significant effect of digitization is increased velocity, complexity, ambiguity, unpredictability, and a need for a faster response to changes in businesses and industries based on effective and efficient decision making. It’s important to set well-defined principles for guiding decision-making on a day to day basis. The principles as a digital compass will guide all levels of the organization to be able to make decisions in a very organic relationship with its environment. Chapter 3 Digital Decision-Making Styles: Decision making is both the art and science. Having all the facts to make the best decision is a utopia we would all like. But in practice, each person has his or her own cognitive strength, knowledge expertise, capability, experience, or the tailored style to become a decision master. At group setting, in order to make the best decisions, it is better having a mix of complementing mindsets, skills and decision-making styles for achieving decision maturity. Chapter 4 Decision-Making Pitfalls: Making decision is one of the significant tasks for digital leaders and professionals today. However, the high ratio of strategic decisions has been made poorly and causes catastrophic effects. What are key factors contributing to poor quality decision-making? How to avoid potential decision-making pitfalls for improving decisions effectiveness and maturity. Chapter 5 Decision Maturity: The reason decision making is often a difficult task because it is contextual and situational, it takes a unique individual to understand a situation and relate it to the present. There are many variables in complex decision making, there are tradeoffs you have to leverage, and there is no magic formula to follow. At the Digital Era, making wise decisions means to leverage multidimensional thought processes, advanced analytic tools, the human intuition, and efficient processes to improve the overall effectiveness and maturity of decision making. Decision making is an art only until the person understands the science (process, analytics, tool, etc.). It takes the multidisciplinary approach, to frame the right questions before answering them. It has to leverage multidimensional decision intelligence with a combination of both creative thinking and critical thinking, divergent thinking and convergent thinking, strategic thinking and systems thinking, holistic thinking and paradoxical thinking. Ensure you are both information savvy and be flexible to select the optimal solutions with decision wisdom.
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About The Author


Pearl is a digital visionary who can capture business insight, technology foresight, and perceive digital leadership and management philosophy from multi-dimensional lenses and global perspectives. She is also a forward-thinking digital leader who advocates business innovation and culture evolution. Pearl is a prolific blogger who creates a professional and popular blog: “Future of CIO,” which has reached the 3500+ posting milestones and catching 1,700, 000 + views from a worldwide audience. It covers more than 59+ hot IT and management subjects such as future of leadership, IT trends, digital transformation, organizational culture and management, business strategy and execution, innovation, IT transformation, Digital Master tuning, decision effectiveness, CIO Debate, Digital Transformation, Culture Master, talent management and risk intelligence, etc. Pearl has worked for both Fortune 100 companies to gain a variety of experiences and startup to present entrepreneur spirit. Her cross-industrial, cross-functional and cross-cultural backgrounds make her a natural strategic and creative thinker, always see the other side of the coin, also inspire her to observe deeper and broader with the fresh eyes and open mind, to become a relentless change agent, the symbol of innovation, and a forward-looking digital leader. She holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, and she lives in San Francisco Bay Area for 15+ years.
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