Dec 20, · Hilariously bad decision making on the part of politicians, business leaders, and the growing list of Darwin Award-winners leave many people in Sep 18, · The year-old, whose businessman-husband Raj Kundra is currently in custody in an ongoing case regarding pornographic content, posted a message about 'bad decisions' and a 'brand new ending'. The post by Shetty, whose last film appearance was Priyadarshan's 'Hungama 2', included a quote by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Carl Bard Aug 01, · Research has shown that the typical person makes about 2, decisions every waking blogger.com decisions are minor and we make them instinctively or
6 Reasons We Make Bad Decisions, and What to Do About Them
Decision making lies at the heart of our personal and professional lives. Yet the daunting reality is that enormously important decisions made by intelligent, responsible people with the best information and intentions are nevertheless hopelessly flawed at times.
Modern neuroscience teaches us that two hardwired processes in the brain —pattern recognition and emotional tagging —are critical to decision making. Both bad business decisions normally reliable; indeed, bad business decisions, they provide us with an evolutionary advantage, bad business decisions. But in certain circumstances, either one can trip us up and skew our judgment. Using a global chemical company as an example, the authors describe the steps leaders can take to counteract those biases: inject fresh experience or analysis, introduce further debate bad business decisions more challenges to their thinking, and impose stronger governance.
Rather than rely on the wisdom bad business decisions experienced chairmen, the humility of CEOs, or the standard organizational checks and balances, the authors urge, everyone involved in important decisions should explicitly consider whether red flags exist and, if they do, lobby for appropriate safeguards. Every day we make bad business decisions. Some are small, domestic, and innocuous. Inevitably, we make mistakes along the way. The daunting reality is that enormously important decisions made by intelligent, responsible people with the best information and intentions are sometimes hopelessly flawed.
Consider Jürgen Schrempp, CEO of Daimler-Benz. He led the merger of Chrysler and Daimler against internal opposition. Nine years later, Daimler was forced to virtually give Chrysler away in a private equity deal.
Bad business decisions Russell, chief executive of Boots, the UK drugstore chain, launched a health care strategy designed to differentiate the stores from competitors and grow through new health care services such as dentistry. It turned out, though, that Boots managers did not have the skills needed to succeed in health care services, bad business decisions, and many of these markets offered little profit potential.
Brigadier General Matthew Broderick, chief of the Homeland Security Operations Center, who was responsible for alerting President Bush and other senior government officials if Hurricane Katrina breached the levees in New Orleans, went home on Monday, bad business decisions, August 29,after reporting that they seemed to be holding, despite multiple reports of breaches, bad business decisions.
The reality is that important decisions made by intelligent, responsible people with the bad business decisions information and intentions are sometimes hopelessly flawed. All these executives were highly qualified for their jobs, and yet they made decisions that soon seemed clearly wrong.
And more important, how can we avoid making similar mistakes? We began by assembling a database of 83 decisions that we felt were flawed at the time they were made. From our analysis of these cases, we concluded that flawed decisions start with errors of judgment made by influential individuals. Hence we needed to understand how these errors of judgment occur.
Leaders make quick decisions by recognizing patterns in the situations they encounter, bad business decisions, bolstered by emotional associations attached to those patterns. Most of bad business decisions time, the process works well, but it can result in serious mistakes when judgments are biased.
Example: When Wang Laboratories launched its own personal computer, founder An Wang chose to create a proprietary operating system even though the IBM PC was clearly becoming the standard. This blunder was influenced by his belief that IBM had cheated him early in his career, which bad business decisions him reluctant to consider using a system linked to an IBM product.
To guard against distorted decision making and strengthen the decision process, get the help of an independent person to identify which decision makers are likely to be affected by self-interest, emotional attachments, or misleading memories.
Example: The about-to-be-promoted head of the cosmetics business at one Indian company was considering whether to appoint her number two as her successor. She recognized that her judgment might be distorted by her attachment to her colleague and by her vested interest in keeping her workload down during her transition. The executive asked a headhunter to evaluate her colleague and to determine whether better candidates could be found externally.
If the risk of distorted decision making is high, companies need to build safeguards into the decision process: Expose decision makers to additional experience and analysis, design in more debate and opportunities for challenge, and add more oversight. Example: In helping the CEO make an important strategic decision, the chairman of one global chemical company encouraged the chief executive to seek advice bad business decisions investment bankers, set up a project team to analyze options, and create a steering committee that included the chairman and the CFO bad business decisions generate the decision.
In the following pages, we will describe the conditions that promote errors of judgment and explore ways organizations can build protections into the decision-making process to reduce the risk of mistakes, bad business decisions. To put all this in context, however, we first bad business decisions to understand just how the human brain forms its judgments. We depend primarily on two hardwired processes for decision making. Both of these processes are normally reliable; they are part of our evolutionary advantage.
But in certain circumstances, both can let us down, bad business decisions. Pattern recognition is a complex process that integrates information from as many as 30 different parts of the brain. Faced with a new situation, we make assumptions based on prior experiences and judgments. Thus a chess master can assess a chess game and choose a high-quality move in as little as six seconds by drawing on patterns he bad business decisions she has seen before.
But pattern recognition can also mislead us. What happened to Matthew Broderick during Hurricane Katrina is instructive. Broderick had been involved in operations centers in Vietnam and in other military engagements, and he had led the Homeland Security Operations Bad business decisions during previous hurricanes.
Unfortunately, he had no experience with a hurricane hitting a city built below sea level. By late on August 29, some 12 hours after Katrina hit New Orleans, Broderick had received 17 reports of major flooding and levee breaches.
But he also had gotten conflicting information. The Army Bad business decisions of Engineers had reported that it had no evidence of levee breaches, and a late afternoon CNN report from Bourbon Street in the French Quarter had shown city dwellers partying and claiming they had dodged the bullet.
So before going home for the night, he issued a situation report stating that the levees had not been breached, although he did add that further assessment would be needed the next day. Emotional tagging is the process by which emotional information attaches itself to the thoughts and experiences stored in bad business decisions memories.
This emotional information tells us whether to pay attention to something or not, bad business decisions, and it tells us what sort of action we should be contemplating immediate or postponed, fight or flight, bad business decisions. When the parts of our brains controlling emotions are damaged, we can see how important emotional tagging is: Neurological research shows that we become slow and incompetent decision makers even though we can retain the capacity for objective analysis.
Like pattern recognition, emotional tagging helps us reach sensible decisions most of the time. But it, too, can mislead us, bad business decisions.
Take the case of Wang Laboratories, the top company in the word-processing industry in the early s. Unfortunately, he chose to create a proprietary operating system despite the fact that the IBM PC was clearly becoming the dominant standard in the industry.
He believed he had been cheated by IBM over a new technology he had invented early in his career. These feelings made him reject a software platform linked to an IBM product even though the platform was provided by a third bad business decisions, Microsoft. The most obvious reason is that much of the mental work we do is unconscious. This makes it hard to check the data and logic we use when we make a decision.
Typically, we spot bugs in our personal software only when we see the results of our errors in judgment, bad business decisions. Matthew Broderick found out that his ground-truth rule of thumb was an inappropriate response to Hurricane Katrina only after it was too late.
Compounding the problem of high levels of unconscious thinking is the lack of checks and balances in our decision making. Our brains do not naturally follow the classical textbook model: Lay out the options, define the objectives, and assess each option against each objective. Instead, we analyze the situation using pattern recognition and arrive at a decision to act or not by using emotional tags.
The two processes happen almost instantaneously. Indeed, as the research of psychologist Gary Klein shows, our brains leap to conclusions and are reluctant to consider alternatives. Moreover, we are particularly bad at revisiting our initial assessment of a situation—our initial frame. Our brains leap to conclusions and are reluctant to consider alternatives; we are particularly bad at revisiting our initial assessment of a situation. An exercise we frequently run at Ashridge Business School shows how hard it is to challenge the initial frame.
We give students a case that presents a new technology as a good business opportunity. Even though the financial model consistently calculates negative returns from launching the new technology, some teams never challenge bad business decisions original frame and end up proposing aggressive investments.
In analyzing how it is that good leaders made bad judgments, we found bad business decisions were affected in all cases by three factors that either distorted their emotional tags or encouraged them to see a false pattern. The first and most familiar red flag condition, the presence of inappropriate self-interesttypically biases the emotional importance we place on information, which in turn makes us readier to perceive the patterns we want to see.
Research has shown that even well-intentioned professionals, such as doctors and auditors, are unable to prevent self-interest from biasing their judgments of which medicine to prescribe or opinion to give during an audit.
The second, bad business decisions, somewhat less familiar condition is the presence of distorting attachments. We can become attached to people, places, and things, and these bonds can affect the judgments we form about both the situation we face and the appropriate actions to take. The final red flag condition is the presence of misleading memories. These are memories that seem relevant and comparable to the current situation but lead our thinking down the wrong path, bad business decisions.
They can cause us to overlook or undervalue some important differentiating factors, as Matthew Broderick did when he gave too little thought to the implications of a hurricane hitting a city below sea level. The chance of being misled by memories is bad business decisions by any emotional tags we have attached to the past experience. Unfortunately, the similarities between Snapple and Gatorade proved to be superficial, which meant that Quaker ended up destroying rather than creating value.
Many experienced leaders do this already. For important decisions, we need a deliberate, structured way to identify likely sources of bias—those red flag conditions—and we need to strengthen the group decision-making process, bad business decisions. Consider the situation faced by Rita Chakra, head of the cosmetics business of Choudry Holdings the names of the companies and people cited in this and the following examples have been disguised.
She was promoted head of the consumer products division and needed to decide whether to promote her number two into her cosmetics job or recruit someone from outside. Can we anticipate any potential red flags in this decision? Yes, her emotional tags could be unreliable because of a distorting attachment she may have to her colleague or an inappropriate self-interest she could have in keeping her workload down while changing jobs.
And since the greater part of decision making is unconscious, Rita would not know either. What we do know is that there is a bad business decisions. So how should Rita protect herself, bad business decisions, or how should her boss help her protect herself?
The simple answer is to involve someone else—someone who has bad business decisions inappropriate attachments or self-interest. That person could challenge her thinking, force her to review her logic, encourage her to consider options, and possibly even champion a solution she would find uncomfortable.
Fortunately, in this situation, Rita was already aware of some red flag conditions, and so she involved a headhunter to help her evaluate her colleague and external candidates.
In the end, Rita did appoint her colleague but only after checking to see if her judgment was biased. But few leaders do so in a structured way, and as a result many fail to provide sufficient safeguards against bad decisions. The management team in charge of the division had twice promised a turnaround and twice failed to deliver. The CEO, Mark Thaysen, was weighing his options.
It had been assembled over the previous five years through two large and four smaller acquisitions.
15 Worst Business Decisions Ever
, time: 9:016 Secrets to Making Business Decisions That Get Results
Sep 18, · Related: Why Good Employees Make Bad Decisions For example, a good technique is to talk to your important business colleagues and managers to get Some of your decisions will be great, and some of them not so much. . Here are 20 of the worst business decisions ever made to illustrate that point, and we have added a mention of retail mistakes that came about due to the pandemic. We’ve not these bad business decisions in a particular order, take a look: 1. Somebody Should Have Phoned Home Now, for the first time, Newsmax TV’s special “BAD DECISIONS: The Joe Biden Story” presents a powerful, unflinching and balanced look at the checkered record of the Democratic presidential candidate.. Biden may become the 46 th President of the United States.. But the American media have never examined his real recordas a Senator, as Vice President, as a citizen and public figure
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