Business Decision Making Workshop

The course will focus on two key elements of leadership: (1) making decisions rationally, and (2) influencing others effectively.

Do you perceive yourself as a rational decision maker, someone who thinks through important decisions carefully and chooses the outcome that would be best in the long term? If so, you might be in for a big surprise. Although most educated people believe that they make decisions rationally, people often use a variety of rules and heuristics that lead to suboptimal decision making in many situations. This course will reveal many important decision making slippages that occur in people’s everyday life and discusses their implications for leadership. 

In addition to making rational decisions, one of the key requirements for being an effective leader is influencing others, that is, getting others to take actions for the benefit of the team or the organization even if they don’t want to. This course will provide insights on how you can influence other people without the other person even realizing that you are trying to influence them. You can just tilt the scales to nudge them to make the choice that you want them to make.

The instructor would demonstrate many decision making slippages in class using exercises, tasks, and surveys, and discuss various business contexts in which such slippages occur. The basic principles learned in class would have applications across a wide range of business decision making contexts, including financial decisions, investment decisions, managing employees, planning mergers, selling products, and negotiating with others.

An improved understanding of how you and others tend to make decisions, and how you should make decisions, will greatly increase your effectiveness as future leaders.