Thought Leadership

5 Simple Steps for Effective Decision Making
A Candid Conversation with Paul Witz, CEO of Witz Training

Some people really struggle with making decisions. Some people just can’t make up their minds.  Neither can some companies.  But if they knew what their indecision was costing them, would they change how they operate?

In 2001, Ram Charan, a former faculty member at Harvard Business School wrote an article titled, “Conquering a Culture of Indecision.”  In it, he talks about companies that have successfully created frameworks for decisive action.  Highly marketed and distributed this article was published in the April 2006 issue of The Harvard Business Review and met with many accolades.  However, it’s almost ten years later and the problem exists even more
profoundly today.

Indecision or lack of decisiveness is costing companies thousands of dollars every day.  Opportunities are being lost, productivity is waning and the moral of millions of leaders and employees is eroding.  Not to mention that actual bottom line results that are being affected.

According to business and economic analysts the cost of lost opportunities and lack-
luster productivity in North America is somewhere in the billions of dollars.  Indecision affects companies across markets and industries.  For example a large national construction  company we work with told us the following when talking about decision making and a
recent project that was on the table, “We (company execs) dropped the ball.  By taking too long to make a decision we lost out on the entire bidding process which could have been worth over $2 million to our bottom line last year.”

History is full of stories such as this.  Take for example the following cases, taken from an article on Digg;

In the late 70’s Kane Kramer came up with a device that would now be known as an MP3 player.  His sketches from 1979 show a credit card-sized player with a rectangular screen and a central menu button to scroll through a selection of music tracks using arrows for left, right, up and down.
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