Tag Archives: management

July 5, 2012 · 9:31 am

How To Make Better Decisions

I played in the annual July 4 scramble golf tournament yesterday.

A golf ball directly before the hole

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For you non-golfers out there, this is a team competition in which each member of the team hits a shot, the team selects the best one, and everyone then hits the next shot from that position. Once on the green, hopefully with more than one ball, the team chooses from which ball position to putt and everyone gives it a go from there. If the team is playing pretty well, there are often a few decisions to make. Do we forsake some distance for a better lie? Do we putt the shorter putt or the straighter one? Do we chip a ball that’s off the green but close to the hole or putt a ball that’s way on the other side of the green?
Your thinking is influenced by your particular abilities. I’d always rather putt than chip, and while distance isn’t usually a problem for me, it might be for the other members of the team who’d rather hit out of the rough if they can be 25 yards closer to the green.  And of course, this raises a business point too.

There’s a good piece today in Lifehacker about how as part of beating back confirmation bias (the tendency to listen only to the data or opinions that confirm our own) we need to take the other person’s perspective – walk a mile in their shoes – as we consider their opinions.  It works for research too – who funded it, what might the researcher’s biases be, etc.  Most importantly, when we’re asking for advice, taking the person’s perspective along with the advice helps overcome the blindness confirmation bias can instill.  This is a good article on that phenomenon.

The ability to get past your own beliefs in considering outside information is a key to being successful.  It goes with the ability the synthesize and communicate your thinking effectively.  We won the tournament yesterday so I’m very happy with how we communicated and thought as a group, even when my opinion was overruled.  Even when our shots weren’t perfect, our thinking was awfully good.  How’s yours?

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July 3, 2012 · 9:20 am

Surprise!

“Surprise” is a loaded word.

Mega Surprise

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We delight in surprise parties (well, maybe as long as we’re not the one being surprised) and we dislike surprise hairs in our soup (particularly if they’re not our color).  It’s a powerful concept, although I guess the scientists would tell you that it’s not the surprise itself that’s the issue – it’s the emotions that follow the surprise event.

Surprise is a concept of which we need to take full advantage in business while simultaneously avoiding it like the plague.  When a customer can’t find something in the store, we can take joy in their surprise when a store employee digs around in the back until they find an item thought to be out of stock.  This happened to the Mrs. just this past weekend. She’s now a customer for life and has been telling the story to everyone.  Earned media indeed!

On the other hand, when you advertise a product on sale and are out of stock an hour after the store opens, customers feel as if they’ve been lied to – it’s hard for them to believe you haven’t pulled a classic bait and switch to get them to the store.

Managing people often involves surprises of both sorts.  There are little ones like a key person calling in sick and big ones like them resigning.  On the other hand, sometimes we’re surprised by pieces of business those employees find out of the blue or by their achieving a higher standard in their work.  Yay!

I guess what it all means is that we need to manage expectations constantly both to avoid the bad kinds of surprise and to increase the impact of the good kind.  No, we shouldn’t have people thinking that a hair in their soup is permissible – that shows a need to manage something other than expectations – but we can make sure that when we set standards we adhere to them.  Customers and employees notice.  Our job is to surprise them in the good way.  Given how few organizations are able to get to their own professed standards, it shouldn’t be that difficult a task.  You agree?

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June 12, 2012 · 7:41 am

Buying Shirts

If you’ve ever walked through the part of a big department store where they sell men’s shirts (and ties – remember them?), you might have noticed that there’s almost an infinite number of choices.

WASHINGTON - DECEMBER 28: A shopper looks thr...

(Getty Images via @daylife)

At least it seems so to me. Collar styles, colors, patterns, and cuffs are all mixed up in a lot of variations. I suppose it’s the same in the dress department – an overwhelming number of possibilities.  I bring this up because a project in which I’m involved has stumbled into a figurative department store.  The technology is filled with possibilities.  So many, in fact, that we’re at a point where we need to exclude some intriguing avenues just so we can get to the checkout with something in our carts.

Working with highly energized, very creative people has a downside.  They tend to see so many possibilities – all the shirts and dresses – that they’re often running off in a hundred directions while not really advancing.  To a certain extent, that sort of war gaming is critical.  It’s a less formal type of decision tree analysis that many of us like to do.  However, there comes a time when the branches of that tree with less potential or which don’t meet near term goals (and for new ventures that usually includes kicking off revenue pretty quickly) need to be trimmed off.

In this case, what we’re trying to do is to lay out all the possibilities, to look at the possible outcomes of making each choice, to assign values and probabilities to each branch of the tree and to make a decision based on our best guesses and whatever information we already have.  In other words, buy a shirt.  We’ve spent enough time trying things on and holding them up to the mirror.  We need to get out of the store and get to work.  And so do you!

Thoughts?

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