On Making Decisions

Decisions - crucial or minor - are a facet of business that every employee faces. My decision making method is probably different than my colleague. Maybe I intuit the decision with sparse information. I might run vigorous analysis of available data instead. The point is that there is little uniformity in most business offices when it comes to decision making.

The operations course I am taking now is common across all MBA programs: Decision Modeling. The course posits that decision making can be augmented toward greater success with the educated employment of models. The three primary models available to business men and women are as follows:

• Decision Trees
• Linear Programming
• Integer Programming

I'm enjoying the projects we have in this course. It's fun drawing decision nodes and evaluating what is in and out of my control in the decision process. The fun I'm having, however, is not translating to practicality for many of my peers. The recurring grievance orbits the theory versus reality argument: this is fun to do in a lab setting, but do you have the time or patience to use it outside of this vacuum?

This leads to an underlying issue with MBA programs: I am being exposed to a number of great practices, but will I ever use them again? The problem is that processes like decision making modeling require practice - in spades. Once you get past this class, your focus moves either to the next core requisite or to your concentration courses. Not all concentrations employ decision trees equally. So for many, this class is the last time they will see decision modeling and that seems like a waste of time and money.

I need to point out something about this course that is more of a subtext than the headline. Whether you incorporate the models learned into your decision making repertoire or not, this class exposes you to a methodical, tested means to evaluating decisions. It does not substitute intuition with modeling. It incorporates the two. This course exposes the student to thinking about decision from an unnatural perspective: do not make the decision that "feels" right immediately.

If anything, this is the big takeaway from the course.