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Our most recent and most popular eBriefings are available on demand at no charge.
The Power of Scenarios to Improve Strategic Decisions
Scenarios and scenario planning are powerful tools that can help us picture how the future might unfold. Through scenarios, decision-makers can imagine future prospects more clearly, grapple with uncertainty, and encourage organizational learning.
The Upside of Risk: A Better Way to View Enterprise Risk Management
As more and more companies implement Enterprise Risk Management programs, the forward-thinking companies are moving beyond risk protection and compliance to embrace the upside of risk.
Leading Decision Makers Who Outrank You
In strategic decision-making, decision leaders walk a tightrope of managing decision-makers' expectations, conflicting objectives, and packed schedules.
How Hidden Biases Sabotage Your Decisions
The human intellect is extremely powerful and capable. But our minds have evolved with biases that work against good judgment and decision-making.
The 21st Century Decision Loom: Weaving Together Ideas, Knowledge, and Technology for Better Decisions
In a world with increased customer and market diversity, a world with significantly increased data available to customers and competitors alike, how can we approach decision-making?
Proactive Decision Making: Personal and Business Decisions and Other Important Choices
Is bad decision-making a leading cause of death?
Opportunity Loss: Unnoticed and Uncounted Sources of Value
What size of missed opportunity would be considered as bad as losing $10 million in your company?
Decision Quality: The Art and Science of Good Decision-Making
Successful business leaders know that decision-making must be fast, be effective, and maximize value.
Strategic Innovation: The Power of Design Thinking in Business
Innovation has become for many companies not only a priority, but also the driving force of expansion, exploration, and success.
Competition, Collaboration, Negotiation: Game Theory and Multiparty Decisions
What are the best ways to approach decisions when there are multiple decision makers, each with different information, motives, and goals?
Strategic Risk Management in Healthcare: How to Manage Uncertainty and Make Better Decisions
Healthcare faces daunting challenges with the growing cost and complexity of care, alarming demographic trends, and the effects of healthcare reform. Historical "silos" of risk management in healthcare variously work on quality, safety, compliance, audit, insurance, etc., but the risk management is neither integrated nor does it address the "upside" of risk: how to make better strategic decisions and manage uncertainty to create value in addition to protecting value.
Back From the Brink: How Strategic Risk Management Helped a US Manufacturer Avoid Bankruptcy
This US manufacturer couldn’t evade the financial misfortunes of the past 18 months. But NCI Building Systems, which makes engineered metal building systems, saw first-hand how strategic risk management could influence the future of the enterprise.
Corporate Risk Appetite: How to Specify It and Apply It Consistently
Many organizations squander their attractive — but risky — opportunities, because they can't judge risks. A well-specified risk appetite can replace confusion, inconsistency, and personal risk aversion and provide a universal yardstick for adjusting value for risk. Then organizations can take the right risks — and do so consistently.
Value-Driven ERM: What Boards and Senior Executives Want Most From Their Enterprise Risk Programs
Many companies have adopted some kind of Enterprise Risk Management process, replete with risk identification, risk assessment, risk cataloging, risk mapping, and risk management reports. But now, forward-looking corporate boards and top executives are asking a different question: How can Enterprise Risk Management create and protect enterprise value?
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.
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.
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.
