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for example, when to apply principle and when to be pragmatic; when
to compromise and when to be single-minded; when to be innovative
and to challenge; when to conform; and above all, a sense of when a
decision will succeed and when it will fail.
Through such an analysis the quality of decisions should improve,
and there should also be more consistency, making it easier for others to
understand and emulate them. Furthermore, developing a clear and con-
sistent approach to decision-making provides a fallback position, so that
when pressure and/or complexity increase or urgency escalates, there is
a reliable, tried-and-tested approach to fall back on, honed during less
stressful or critical times. To misquote Kipling: if you can keep your
head while about you others are losing theirs, it is just possible you
haven t grasped the situation.
However, there is no escape: the role of the strategic decision-maker
is a pressured and lonely one, often with lingering uncertainty as an
occupational hazard as the decision plays out. Developing personal
strategies to handle this pressure is important, but ultimately, delivering
decisions that achieve success is immensely rewarding. It is certainly
worth remembering the words of Marie Curie, a particularly pressured,
unconventional but effective decision-maker:
One never notices what has been done, one can only see what
remains to be done.
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NOTES AND REFERENCES
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1 Social, cultural and commercial forces
1 Handy, C., The Empty Raincoat: Making Sense of the Future, Random
House, 1995 (published in the United States by Harvard Business
School Press as The Age of Paradox).
2 Semler, R., Maverick!, Arrow, 1994.
3 Kaplan, R. and Norton, D., The Balanced Scorecard: Translating
Strategy into Action, Harvard Business School Press, 1996.
4 Marchand, D.A., Kettinger, W.J. and Rollins, J., Making the Invisible
Visible, John Wiley & Sons, 2001.
5 The US Small Business Administration published these figures in
1995, the last year for which reliable figures are available. Since
then, the cost is estimated to have increased by a further 12%.
6 Drucker, P., They re Not Employees, They re People , Harvard
Business Review, February 2002.
7 Stewart, T.A., Intellectual Capital, Doubleday, 1997.
8 Drucker, P., The Age of Discontinuity, Harper and Row, 1969.
9 For further information, see Edvinsson, L. and Malone, M.,
Intellectual Capital: Realising Your Company s True Value by Finding
its Hidden Brainpower, HarperBusiness, 1997.
10 Peters, T. and Waterman, R., In Search of Excellence, Harper and
Row, 1982.
11 Naisbitt, J., Global Paradox: the bigger the global economy, the more
powerful its smallest players, Simon and Schuster, 1995.
12 Special Report: Diasporas , The Economist, January 4th 2003.
13 Globalisation statistics are provided by the Economist Intelligence
Unit. For further information, see www.eiu.com, and also the
Economist Intelligence Unit s World Competitiveness Yearbook.
14 This example and the broader issues it raises are expertly explored
in Read, C., Ross, J., Dunleavy, J., Schulman, D. and Bramante. J.,
eCFO: sustaining value in the corporation, John Wiley & Sons, 2001.
15 Marchand, D.A. (ed.), Competing with Information: A manager s
guide to creating business value with information content, John Wiley
& Sons, 1999.
16 Marchand et al., Making the Invisible Visible.
17 Drucker, P., Management Challenges for the Twenty-First Century,
Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999.
18 Pearce, F., Mamma Mia , New Scientist, July 20th 2002.
19 Kellaway, L., Boardroom Styles , The World in 2003, The
Economist, 2003.
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BUSINESS STRATEGY
2 Ideas at work
1 Farnham, A., The man who changed work forever , Fortune, July
21st 1997.
2 Written by Frederick Taylor in 1911 in The Principles of Scientific
Management. For a more recent analysis, see Taylor, F., Scientific
Management, Harper and Row, 1948.
3 Ansoff, I., Corporate Strategy, McGraw-Hill, 1965.
4 Hamel, G. and Prahalad, C.K., Competing for the Future, Harvard
Business School Press, 1994.
5 Peters and Waterman, In Search of Excellence.
6 Senge, P., The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning
Organisation, Doubleday, 1991.
7 Porter, M., Strategy and the Internet , Harvard Business Review,
March 2001.
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