On Demand

Game-Changing Energy Storage: What Utilities Should Consider Today

The recent DOE awards of $185 million for 16 grid-scale energy storage projects is evidence of the game-changing role energy storage is likely to play in the electricity industry.

Prioritizing R&D at Baxter Healthcare

Baxter Healthcare invests nearly $1 billion annually on innovative science to develop specialty therapies and medical products. To better assess the tradeoffs required in R&D decision-making, Baxter developed a portfolio system that captures technical and commercial uncertainty in R&D investments.

Smart Cost-Cutting: How to Emerge From Budget Pressure Stronger and More Secure

How do you respond to corporate pressure to reduce headcount when previous reductions in force have already left your team lean and effective? For HP, the answer was found by measuring the "market value" of every resource.

Cost and Schedule Risk Management of Large Capital Projects

In the current economic environment, large-scale capital projects – those facing tremendous risk due to their long time horizons, complexity, and resource requirements – will continue to experience sizable cost overruns or schedule delays without rigorous analysis and thoughtful management of risk.

Resource Allocation in an Epic Downturn

For companies in the electricity service industry, it's not just about hunkering down and waiting it out.

Better. Cheaper. Faster. How Value-Based Management Delivers Vastly Improved Portfolio Results

Why Inspire Pharmaceuticals switched from a Balanced Scorecard approach to managing its product pipeline to a value-based portfolio management system.

The Decision Leadership Dilemma

The most successful decision process leaders rarely use the word "process." Why? Because, simply put, the senior decision-makers they serve want to focus on decision-making - not "process" - and are not fond of formal decision processes.

Thriving in the Midst of Storm

One need only pick up the paper or turn on the news to be bombarded with uncertainty about the future. Job security. Tight credit. Stock prices. The fact is, the future has always been uncertain, but there was some comfort in the sense that uncertainty was "out there," over long time horizons: years, if not decades away. Now, the uncertain future is immediate, and real.

Enterprise Risk Management

Many companies are implementing Enterprise Risk Management — or ERM in management parlance — and corporate leaders are paying attention to their methods and processes for dealing with uncertainty. But "compliance-centric" ERM misses the real opportunity to protect and enhance shareholder value.

Why Decisions Go Bad

Why is it that many of our decisions — decisions we thought at the time to be rational, sensible, and prudent — seem to turn out so wrong?

Decision Leadership

Lead groups toward high-quality decisions by leveraging your leadership abilities, facilitating difficult situations, and managing group dynamics.

Strategic Innovation

Innovation is the life's blood of corporate growth — but in many cases, the creative side of business finds itself at odds with the financial side that demands proof of concept for ideas that have never before been tested.

Destructive Decision-Making Habits

We all have good – and bad – habits. When we encounter a difficult problem, our habit is to take it into our comfort zone. We deal with the problem based on what comes naturally, not necessarily what is important.

Get It Right the First Time

Corporations are finding that across all functions and at every level, decision-making must be faster, more effective, and done right the first time.

Strategic Decision and Risk Management

The Stanford Certificate Program in Strategic Decision and Risk Management gives you the decision-making tools you need to be an invaluable leader -- whether the decisions you make are about capacity investments, international market entry, marketing programs, pricing policy, major customer and supplier contracts, acquisitions, new products, or R&D investments.

Peripheral Vision

Two-thirds of a sample of corporate strategists admitted that their companies had been surprised – more than once – by high-impact events in the past five years. Why are organizations so often surprised? Usually, some people knew in advance about the event that became a surprise. But management didn't know they knew. There are usually plenty of weak signals on the periphery that, in retrospect, held clues. Organizations need to develop the capacity to discern these signals while attending to their short-term goals.

Organizational Decision Competency

As organizations grow flatter, leaner, and nimbler, decision authority is being increasingly pushed to the front lines - requiring many more executives to have a greater degree of "decision competency" than ever before. Decision tools have proliferated, becoming more accessible to the decision makers, but it is hard to separate good tools from bad without in-depth understanding.

Embracing Uncertainty in Forecasts and Budgets

In today’s business environment, deviations from expectations are punished harshly, not only for underperformance but also for erratic over-performance where companies are seen to be surprising even themselves. Poor business visibility and smaller supply-chain buffers make it increasingly difficult to set and manage expectations as well as to create consistent and fair incentives.