As we study entrepreneurship and think about the entrepreneurial mindset, we want to spend some time talking about strategic decisions.
In this context, our goals are to help reflect on the essential elements of entrepreneurial decision-making.
Connect this element of awareness to entrepreneurship, and think about how to examine decision-making in a unique context and the important tasks entrepreneurs need as they select and evaluate opportunities as well as rebuild and grow their enterprise.
What is the decision making process?
The decision-making process is:
- Cognitive process. What we mean by knowledge, is just thinking in the mind of an entrepreneur, and there are many exercises and biases that we will write about.
- The choice. There is always a choice, the choice to do nothing, it's still a choice.
And we'll talk about some of the items in there as well. So with strategic decisions, not where are you going to have lunch today?
It's something a little more important, we want to recognize a problem, we want to think of alternatives, we want to evaluate those alternatives, and we want to choose the alternative that best meets our criteria for our evaluation criteria.
We also want to realize that studying entrepreneurial decision making leads to better decisions and leads to better entrepreneurs.
And so, what we also want to think about in entrepreneurship is whether these decisions we make are different from what a typical corporate manager might make.
We work as entrepreneurs with limited information if we're doing something almost new by definition, which hasn't been done many times before.
So we don't necessarily have much precedent for action. We need to be a critical process as we work in new markets. We try to take advantage of opportunities in front of others.
We don't want to be idle. We do not want to close the window of opportunity.
We also need to be more accepting of the risks from the company's manager and the potentially dire consequences.
We may only have the opportunity to try something once, we may not have the time or budget to try the same thing a second and third or fourth time, we may need to get it right a little early.
See: How to Explore the Real Market Needs
What is strategic decision making?
In this context, what are some of the consequences of failure? They are a little more or much more important to the business than the company's managers.
Decision making is also a strategic activity. We want to realize that with entrepreneurship, we want to think about our goals, we want to think about whether we are a for-profit company, what are our revenue and profit goals?
What is the market share opportunity we are targeting? What are the advantages of the product we are aiming for? So I'm a believer in setting goals and setting goals will do a lot to plan the path on how to get there.
We also want to realize that we want to be critical in our analysis, we want to think about allocating our resources and allocating our commitment and our relative priorities.
Within strategic decision making, there are a variety of characteristics that play a role. Which:
- Complexity, we want to think about facts and numbers and contingencies, we need to think about elements of uncertainty, we need to think about the rationality of it and it shouldn't target emotion in our decisions purely.
- Control, what intentional actions we can take to maximize our success as entrepreneurs, we want to think about the environment in which we operate.
We're not sure which way to go. This is not uncommon for entrepreneurs at times.
The environment is tough, the environment is dynamic, the environment is changing, we're moving forward, we're going in one direction, our customers, our competitors, our markets, our governments, our regulations may all go in different directions.
And so it's important for entrepreneurs to realize this, think critically and get a big picture of things.
So, a unique challenge and a changing environment, means that we are once again doing new things.
Without the resources and relationships that companies may create, we have high levels of complexity and we want to think about the consequences that come into consideration.
Summary
So in short, we hope to have some tools and techniques for dealing with some of these challenges in this course.
We want to realize that entrepreneurs operate in changing environments.
And that's with discovering opportunities, and that's an essential part of where to start.
Decision making is unique. Decision making is a big task of an entrepreneur.
We want to spend some time thinking about motivations, thinking about behaviors, thinking about an organized mindset and how to make smart decisions, and this will be the starting point for your entrepreneurship journey.