Decision making, the core of what managers do

This chapter introduce s the key aspects of decision making, particularly management decision making, and discusses different approaches to decision making. L. R. Beach and T. Connolly characterize decision making as a sequential process that engages three phases of diagnosis, action selection, and implementation. Managers take different approaches to decision making and will individually decide the roles of data, information, knowledge, and personal judgement when making decisions. The major decision functions that commonly exist in most decision processes include identifying the problem, setting goals, establishing criteria, generating alternatives, evaluating and selecting the most appropriate alternative, implementing the choice, and following up. Decision-making investigations in the naturalistic school concentrate on the decision maker and complex decision-making situations where the decision maker is faced with limited resources and time. M. E. Porter emphasizes that at the core of the success or failure of a firm is the competitive ability to make decisions.