Managerial Decision Making and Leadership by Caroline Wang
By: Ernie Calucag
As companies expand across the globe in pursuit of new markets and sources of supply, corporate decision-making processes are growing increasingly complex. Given today’s high-pressure business conditions, the modern organisation’s arsenal must include knowledgeable and decisive executives.
Business leaders must act confidently, knowing that their decisions are based on intelligent business metrics and not simply gut feel. After all, the best-run companies thrive on the foundation of clear and accurate business decision-making.
This basically sums up Caroline Wang’s Managerial Decision Making and Leadership but the former IBM Executive and MBA Professor offers a fresh take on managerial decision- making as she shares a simple framework that goes by the acronyms: GPA (goal, priority, alternatives) for decision content quality and IPO (information, people, objective reason- ing) for decision process quality.
Wang said her framework, GPA IPO, has helped her make quality decisions in her 25 years leading multicultural teams in various fields at IBM. More importantly, the same framework has likewise been effective in making personal decisions in her everyday life.
At the get-go, Wang explains the complexities of decision- making process, including organisational goal setting, the right values of the decision maker and the finite resources surrounding the decision maker.
As she uncovers her GPA IPO framework in the succeeding chapters in a style that is easy and readable, the complexities of decision-making become a matter of applying those six letters to arrive at quality decision-making, be it at the organi- sation or personal level.
Wang also fills her book with learned insights from case studies presented at the end of each chapter. The cases, simulating real-life situations, represent different geographies, cultures, industries, management levels, roles and types of decisions to illustrate that the GPA IPO framework works for all kinds of decisions. Needless to say, it is the part of the book which I enjoyed and learnt the most even though most of the situations presented here cater to upper management level.
It is on this regard that the book lives up to its label as an essen- tial pocket book to carry by anyone who wants to understand the nuts-and-bolts of the thinking process and to enhance their decision-making prowess.
*This Book Review is sponsored by John Wiley & Sons (Asia) Pte Ltd.
