We had some great speakers and open discussion at the recent OR Society DASIG event on ‘Decision Analysis in the Energy Sector’, held at the Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS) on the 13th July. I will want to pick up … Continue reading
Category Archives: Opinion
Blackrock CEO calls for a strategic approach to long-term growth
Larry Fink of BlackRock, the world’s biggest investor, has written to the CEOs of the largest companies in the world. He talks directly to what we believe in and what we help clients with, including: moving away from a short-term … Continue reading
The Readiness Challenge for Professional Associations
“Learning is not compulsory… neither is survival.” W. Edwards Deming We work with corporations and government departments around the world, helping them to achieve their strategic objectives by focusing their resources on the programs that will best get them there. … Continue reading
How to make a bad decision (or how to make a decision badly…)
Take a spreadsheet. Then take a group of people (whoever you can get) and convene a meeting. Decide what the options are, put each one on a row of the spreadsheet. Decide what the criteria for selection should be, and … Continue reading
Non-profits – stakeholder participation in setting budgets
Choosing how best to allocate a budget amongst competing priorities is challenging, even for corporations with a laser-like focus on a single bottom-line. For non-profits of various sorts, including charities, NGOs and professional membership organisations, there are extra dimensions that … Continue reading
Web-based collaborative decisions
Multi-criteria tools for evaluating options and priorities are typically designed to be operated by experts, and often used in face-to-face facilitated workshops. And while this is great for the people who can work that way, a lot of real-world situations … Continue reading
The cost of poor decision-making in the UK
Through the natural course of our work in Catalyze we see the benefits of good decision-making, and conversely we get a very good idea of the costs and other impacts of poor decision-making (or lack of decision-making, which is more … Continue reading
High level decision making
A client involved in high-level government decision-making made an observation the other day. We were talking about how decisions actually get made out there in the real world. He suggested that senior decision-makers should either immerse themselves in enough detail … Continue reading
Putting your money where your strategy is
McKinsey has found that most companies allocate the same resources to the same business units year after year, regardless of any declared changes in strategy or shifts in their environment. In the article “How to put your money where your … Continue reading
Decision making – beware the chasm!
Decision making is generally a social process involving a number of ‘decision-makers’, discussing different angles, sharing perspectives, considering ramifications of potential choices, and so on. Sometimes it also needs to be a technical process, involving subject matter experts, analysts, and … Continue reading