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DECISION MAKING INTRODUCTION

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The unrealistic expectations of freedom and rights to make your own decisions will destroy a person unless it is recognized that these ideals are privileges and not necessities and therefore they are accompanied by responsibilities.

Fear is not in the habit of speaking the truth; when perfect sincerity is expected, perfect freedom must be allowed. Nor does anyone who is apt to get angry when hearing the truth should wonder why he does not hear it. For example, when I asked a business manager what had made his organization one of the best in his industry, he pointed to his CIO and said "Joe is a millionaire. He can quit any time. He says what he thinks is right!"
Mind is what your brain does consciously. Our minds perform a series of information processing in order to form strategies needed to live our daily lives. This process is known as decision making. However, aside from making decisions, because of many kinds of uncertainties we also face a problem called decidophobia, which is the fear of making the wrong decisions combined with nervous agitation. Moreover, fear of judgement by others is a sure path to unhappiness which is a state of mind.

Decisions are at the heart of success, and at times there are critical moments when they can be difficult, perplexing, and nerve racking. This site provides help and guidance for making efficient and effective decisions by putting to use a well-structured approach and well-focused process known as the modeling or paradigm process. The word paradigm comes from the Greek word paradeigma, meaning "model" or "pattern." A model represents a way of looking at the world, a shared set of assumptions that enable us to understand or predict behavior. Models have a powerful influence on individuals and on society because our view of the world is determined by our set of assumptions about it. To put it another way, our vision is often affected by what we believe about the world; our beliefs often determine the information that we "see."

Decision-making is about facing a question, such as, "To be or not to be?", i.e., to be the one you want to be or not to be? That is a decision. Humanity has always lived in the shadow of fears. Yet almost nothing was known about fear until Freud began the study of unusual phobias. A little later, some psychologists suggested that one dread is common to all mankind: the dread of death.

Decisions, decisions and more decisions! The fear of making serious decisions is a new kind of fear, called decidophobia, proclaimed by Walter Kaufmann at Princeton University in 1973. The fear of making the wrong decisions is well known to any responsible manager. As Eleanor Roosevelt said, "You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face." Wherever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision. There has never yet been a person in the history of mankind who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering. The difficulty in life is the choice.

 
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References
  • Sven Ove Hansson, "Decision Theory: A Brief Introduction", http://www.infra.kth.se/~soh/decisiontheory.pdf (an excellent non-technical and fairly comprehensive primer)
  • Paul Goodwin and George Wright, Decision Analysis for Management Judgment, 3rd edition. Chichester: Wiley, 2004 ISBN 0-470-86108-8 (covers both normative and descriptive theory)
  • Robert Clemen. Making Hard Decisions: An Introduction to Decision Analysis, 2nd edition.
  • Belmont CA: Duxbury Press, 1996. (covers normative decision theory)