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Decision Making at the Executive Level Essay

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Decision Making at the Executive Level The focus of my term paper is the decision making process used by today's top-level managers. Top-level managers, such as Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), Chief Operations Officers (COOs), and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs), must make critical decisions on a daily basis. Their choices and the resulting outcomes affect the company, the employees, and the stakeholders. Due to the high importance of their decisions, the process they use to reach them merits a close examination. A study published in the winter 1997 volume of Business Strategy Review suggests the major factor in a decisions success is the decision process itself. The study, by Paul Nutt, suggests that poor decision making …show more content…

The study divided this task into four different areas. The first area, labeled concept tactic, used a solution to a problem to guide the decision. The second, problem solving, uses an existing problem to direct the decision. The third area, objective setting, uses a preferred performance level to decide the course to follow. The last area, reframing, uses benchmarking to prove that a decision must be made. The last area was implemented more times in the study than the others. I believe that this is because competition is very fierce, and executives often feel that they must keep ahead of others in their industry. By comparing themselves to others of equal size and direction, companies must act fast if they want to keep their competitive advantage. The next step in the decision making process is to identify the alternatives. According to the author of the study, there are three ways to generate options; by copying, searching, or designing. The first way is to adapt an existing option to fit the need. The second way, searching, is to find a company that has a prepackaged solution to achieve the goals. The last way, designing, employs consultants to design a solution. The two most successful ways were copying and searching. I believe this is because the third option requires the company to attempt to explain to the consulting group exactly what

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