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[MBA] Making One Important Decision

photo credit: CommScope 5G_Woman via photopin (license)

A manager makes decisions all the time, that’s why they are the manager. There is a lot that goes into making a decision and sometimes that can be very tiring. Using all the correct tools, information and others around you can be a necessity to finding the correct solutions while not completely overworking yourself.

People with years of experience have tacit knowledge, which is personal, intuitive and most of the time, undocumented knowledge (Cassidy 220). Experts with this type of knowledge tend to be able to make decisions very quickly and can just feel and know they have the correct response. However, Moran Cerf, a Northwestern University neuroscientist, believes that people can only make so many of these types of decisions a day before they suffer from decision fatigue (Weller). How does this expert of the brain make his decisions then?

Cerf suggest making larger, more important decisions that will trickle down into smaller, mostly favorable results. His example is that he chooses which restaurant to visit or chooses the friend he trusts most to make the restaurant choice. Then when they arrive, he always orders the second item on the specials menu. He reasons that the person deciding the specials menu knows what is most tasty, probably better than he does. So, by making one larger decision about which restaurant to visit, the trickle-down effects of letting someone else decide what he is having for dinner typically results in something good to eat (Weller).

Managers should be able to follow these principles as well. By making a few, planned and thoroughly thought-out, important decisions surrounding company goals, they should be able to watch as the trickle-down effects and decisions are made for them to support those goals.

 

 

Works Cited

Cassidy, Carlene, and Robert Kreitner. Management. 12th ed. Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage, 2011. Print.

Weller, Chris. “A Neuroscientist Explains Why He Always Picks the 2nd Menu Item on a List of Specials.” Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo!, 27 July 2017, au.finance.yahoo.com/news/neuroscientist-explains-why-always-picks-032200726.html.

 

 

This post is part of the MBA series. I started my MBA in April of 2017 and decided to get the full use out of some of my writing by also posting it on my blog. 

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