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John and others interesting in decision making case,

>The question I have follows one students often ask. Can you identify a bad
>decision? (By corollary, can you identify a good decision?) It's easy in
>hindsight but what about foresight? For instance, was Napoleon's (or
>Hitler's) invasion of Russia a bad decision at the time?

I was surprised that no one else had responded with a suggestion for group
decision making cases. I guess there have been many threads to attend to!

My thoughts.... While you can't identify a bad decision, you can identify a
bad decision making process; one that is more likely to lead to a poor
decision than an alternative process. This is precisely the focus of more
recent attempts to understand groupthink. In that vein, while the "Bay of
Pigs" case is a classic, there have been a number of efforts to update the
literature with a groupthink case based on the Challenger disaster. I'm
not sure whether this case meets all of your criteria, but it is something
that many of my students identified with. CRM Films (1-800-421-0833) makes
a movie, and I believe there are other sources as well....

Best of luck,

Ken




~~~~~~~~~

Kenneth G. Brown, Ph.D.
Dept of Management and Organizations
108 Pappajohn Business Building
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242
PH: 319.335.3812 FX: 319.335.1956
HTTP://www.biz.uiowa.edu/faculty/kbrown
~~~~~~~~~

In response to Ken Brown's comments on hindsighting decision quality-
continuing with the theme of decisions in the early '60's--
I find a leadership module in the Strategy course based on

Graham Allison's Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis
(Irvington) works best--also
McNamara's In Retrospect and Kai Bird's The Color of Truth
are rich with analyses of decision making processes-with the stakes much
higher than some of the issues in our cases!

Chuck Morrissey, Pepperdine

On Decision Making...

One of my favorite quotes on decision making is located in Peter Singe's
book "The Fifth Descipline." I had used it for decades before I ever saw
it in this text, so I was thrilled to have an academic source for it. Paraphrased
the rule is: The seed of the next problem lies in the solution to the last problem.

In his text he includes the example of the creation of social security as a 10
year project to help seniors during the depression. As we are all aware, the
program didn't end in 10 years like it was originally supposed to do.

As it has been said, it is the decision making methods that can be identified
as bad in advance and, therefore, as having a higher probability of producing
a "bad" decision. My courses include change planning using a classic process
that has "problem identification" as the first step. My business experience
indicates that this is the critical step. That many people do symptom identification
and cure the symptom while making the problem worse.

So, my students have a case study they do that require root cause analysis.
One of the keys I give them to work with is to ask the question each time they
think they have the problem identified: "what is the cause?" In their case it
looks like loss of market share is the problem. It isn't. They have to go at least
6 layers deep to find the one of the problems is failure to include time/labor for
"bug" fixes (it is software) in proposals as a root cause.
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John and others interesting in decision making case,

>The question I have follows one students often ask. Can you identify a bad
>decision? (By corollary, can you identify a good decision?) It's easy in
>hindsight but what about foresight? For instance, was Napoleon's (or
>Hitler's) invasion of Russia a bad decision at the time?

I was surprised that no one else had responded with a suggestion for group
decision making cases. I guess there have been many threads to attend to!