Management at Work Word of your management expertise is starting to spread, and recently the CEO of VoxSigns, a company that develops and maintains electronic billboards similar to this one in Times Square, reached out to you for advice. Jim, the CEO, is trying to determine whether he should lay off 20% of his employees due to declining revenues. Jim wants to know if you can help him make the right decision. First, you help Jim get an overview of the decision-making process by outlining what steps effective decision makers use to arrive at a solution to problems. Identify the order in which the steps are usually taken.
Decision-Making Step Order
Generate alternative courses of action 4
Define the problem 1
Identify the decision criteria 2
Evaluate each alternative 5
Weight the decision criteria 3
Compute the optimal decision 6
Next, you and Jim discuss some of the problems that can occur in the various phases in the decision-making process. For example, when defining the problem, Jim should be careful:
1. To generate new ideas, instead of considering only tried and true solutions
2. To fully understand the gap between current and ideal states
3. Not to use satisficing, rather than maximizing, as a decision-making approach.