Posts Tagged ‘radiolab’
Decision School
It occurred to me this week that the MBA program is really like being in decision school. So much of the learning is around tools and data used to make good decisions — like price and demand curves, financial reports and value nets.
During a break from class, I caught a few minutes of a Radiolab episode about choice. One of the concepts from the broadcast had to do with the idea that the more we qualify our decisions, the more we sway ourselves into buying things we don’t want.
This got me wondering about how often this happens in business and management vs. at the the consumer level. In my line of work, we use business cases to support technology investments — in essence, we qualify our decisions to purchase new tools or expand technology offerings. Because this process typically involves fact-based research, are we soundly in a space where we’re making decisions based on evidence and therefore buying what we want? Or are these decisions, just like those made by many consumers, swayed by the research and pointing us toward things that we don’t want? Are our investments that are guided by this process doomed to the same fate as hanging cat posters?
www.despair.com
