Five Key Skills to Develop For Decision Making
There are five key factors that are essential to today’s decision making:
•Intuition – concerning the direction events may follow.
•Flexibility – concerning a willingness to accept foreign information.
•Initiative – in problem solving, decision making, and creativity.
•Creativity – in opening wider ranges of alternative ideas.
•Adaptability – to new conditions not anticipated earlier.
Intuition: Our expanding technology is daily making available a wide range of new potential products and services on one hand. On the other hand, our expanding and mobile population is daily creating demand for new types of products, thanks to new needs and desires. To decide what your company wants, and to blend it with what the customers want, requires value judgments.
Key executives know that in choosing between broadly separated alternatives, they must often rely on intuition in blending the insufficient information available for decision making. How, for example, can a hosiery manufacturer be sure the trend is to longer or shorter skirts? No decision-maker can ever be sure!
As the output of technology advances and as the interactions of communications are speeded up, permitting reports on mass tastes and trends at an overnight pace, the level of intuition required in these areas to make future value judgments must rise. This is an apparent contradiction with the widely held image that new management skills in the information-gathering area are dramatically reinforcing decision making as a science.
The fact is that the new tools of specialized knowledge in such areas as technology and market research, when compiled with the emerging computer technology, are broadening the known choices for a decision-making executive. An executive must be prepared to work to develop intuition and must not be afraid to act intuitively as information streams around him or her.
Flexibility: In the use of one’s executive intuition (in solving a problem or in reaching a decision), when “all the information is in that we have time to
gather,” we do well to remind ourselves of the need for flexible thinking. We can dam up our intuitive capacities if we become rigid concerning areas we are willing to include in the search of alternatives in the problem solving and the decision-making processes.
This flexibility is close to creative thinking – but not quite the same: the creative process applies largely to the creation of alternatives to our decision making process, while flexibility applies more to the problem solving area.
As we attempt to define the cause or causes of our problems, we benefit by staying flexible. If we prejudge a cause of a problem – or restrict our search for causes – we cut the ground out from underneath the subsequent decision making process.
Initiative: In both problem solving and decision making, a high level of personal executive initiative needs to be exhibited.
• A desire to look for solutions to problems.
• A desire to examine alternative actions.
• A spirit of discontent to fuel creative wonderings.
The subject of initiative is subjective. It is one thing to know the techniques involved in executive decisions – it is quite another to want to enter these processes with both feet.
“Initiative,” “verve,” “drive,” motivation,” or whatever you wish to call it, continues to be the prime variable in the competitive arena – between companies and between executives (assuming all other factors to be relatively even: i.e., personality conflicts, no nepotism, no great educational variables, no great intellectual variables, etc.).
Creativity is a key that can in degree be learned and cultivated as a habit. A person with initiative can become a more creative person by initiating a feeling of discontent with things as they are. Also, a naturally creative mind can prod its “body” to take more initiative in order to see fulfillment of its creative impulses.
Analyze your strengths in both areas – and use one strength to help you raise your sights in the corresponding area.
Adaptability: Behavioral scientists tell us that the true measurement of intelligence is the ability to adjust or adapt quickly to a changing situation. To this extent, adaptability to a changing situation is different from flexibility of thought; it can be said that we should be flexible in our adaptability.
A rapidly changing marketplace may require an executive to adapt to conditions created by his or her competitors. In the process, he or she is hopefully:
• flexible in examining his or her alternate methods of adapting to conditions, and
• flexible in determining what the real cause of his or her problems may be.
All strategic decisions in the executive arena require a degree of adaptability to changing events both inside and outside the company. The complexities of today’s marketplace dictate that rapid adaptability must be a characteristic of the contemporary businessperson.
Make more money faster by easily connecting with hard-to-reach decision makers who can buy your products and services…NOW! Get started free by getting Michael McCann’s new Special Report excerpted from his newest edition of his popular business development book, Connecting with Key Decision Makers (How to Reach Hard-to-Reach Businesspeople Who Can Say “Yes”)…just for asking at http:/www.GlobalBusinessCafe.com/ – http://Twitter.com/MikeHMcCann Go now!
Michael McCann is a 25-year veteran of developing unique and professional business development programs that create tangible results for individuals and companies. Let him help you instantly…free!
Similar Posts:
- Unleashing Creativity and Innovation
- Sales Success – It’s All About Emotion
- Finding an Information Technology Job For You
- Price: How to Delay Talking About Price Until AFTER You Have Identified Value
- Guide to Using Eco Friendly Promotional Items For Business
Post Words:
Michael, McCann, There, •Intuition, •Flexibility, •Initiative, •Creativity, •Adaptability, Intuition, Flexibility