Decision-making

Harvard Business Review (HBR.org) has posted essays by ACS’ Mark Chussil. Here are links.

How do we know when someone is skillful at competing? The thing is, it’s hard to tell the difference between luck and skill…

800,000 subscribers left Netflix after the company raised its prices. That tells us Netflix adopted a bad strategy. Or does it? Fourteen reasons why Netflix was wrong, or not.

Albert Einstein said, “Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.” So when it comes to business decision-making, what’s too simple, what’s not simple enough, and what’s just right? We’ll investigate with Groupon, social ROI, and a strategy simulation.

When strategists choose bad strategies, strategies fail. That sounds obvious, except no strategist purposely chooses a bad strategy. Strategists are smart, experienced, industry-savvy, data-rich, and highly motivated to succeed. Yet smart strategists can and do choose bad strategies, and bad strategies fail.

If we ran a survey asking “are you biased?” we would find no one is. Bias is a characteristic of others, not of ourselves. It’s about you, not me. Which is ironic, and the point.

In business we expect decisions to come from careful analysis in which experts lay out the options, quantify the costs and benefits, and make the right choices. So it may seem perplexing when two senior executives, in symbiotically linked companies, publicly and decisively disagree on a key decision.

Firefighters in New Haven, CT, allege reverse discrimination in a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court. The data seem to support…not so fast, it’s not so clear. What can we learn about the case, what can we learn about using data?

Executive compensation is top-headline news these days. It commands the attention of the President and Congress. It’s an attractive problem, full of righteous indignation, handy villains, and clear action plans. Unfortunately, it’s not the important problem.