Week 2 DT Setting Direction, Advantages Disadvantages, and Decision Models

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SETTING DIRECTION 1 Week 2 Discussion Thread: Setting Direction, Advantages / Disadvantages, and Decision Models Dexter Tyrone Cassell School of Business, Liberty University BUSI 770 – Strategy Formulation and Strategic Thinking Dr. Mize May 22, 2022 Author Note Dexter Tyrone Cassell I have no known conflict of interest to disclose. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dexter Tyrone Cassell Email: dcassell9@liberty.edu

SETTING DIRECTION 2 Introduction In any environment whether it is business, education, research, legal, or any other discipline of operation in the world today, an organization’s success will largely if not wholly depend on the decisions and strategies that are employed. Strategy can happen at any level of the operation; it can be how the custodian cleans an office building to save cost using the least amount of supplies and finish in the shortest amount of time. In contrast it could be a be the CEO of a multinational conglomerate making decisions for expansion into additional markets. This post will seek to explore how to set good strategy and decisions (Cassell, 2022). Process: Setting the Company’s Direction with Strategy In setting a company’s direction with strategy it is important that there is an actual strategy. It sounds so simple, but there are many examples of companies like Enron, and International Harvester who engaged in “Bad Strategy” (Rumelt, 2011) to their detriment and ultimate failure of some or all their business. The difficulty lies in determining what is a good strategic direction vs a bad strategic direction. This is made even more difficult because of the multiple and sometimes contradictory theories regarding strategic decision making. “Strategizing is a crucial organizational practice. Organizations of all shapes and sizes, of different political stripes, operating in vastly different environments, strategize. Whether it is multinational corporations engaging in strategy ‘from above’, political parties strategizing their next move in their quest for power, or insurrectionist social movements pursuing ‘strategies from below’, what is clear is that strategy that matters (Whittle & Carter, 2020).” The process for setting the companies direction and overall strategy starts with setting goals, identifying the road blocks to those goals and creating a process to remove the road blocks to those goals, and finally implementing the process to remove the road blocks. This is a very basic roadmap to setting the

SETTING DIRECTION 3 direction of a company with strategy, but the important thing about the roadmap described above is that it does not suffer from needless fluff which is a component of bad strategy (Cassell, 2020 ;Rumelt, 2011). Strategic Thinking Strategic thinking per Rumelt, 2011 is at its heart the exercise of “good strategy”, but what is “good strategy” and what makes it good and other strategy bad? In order for a strategy to be good it must contain three elements, a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action (Rumelt, 2011). This is necessary in order to be able to find bad strategy within an organization. You can identify bad strategy in much the same way you make good strategy and that is by looking for a set of elements within the strategy. Bad strategy just like its opposite also has elements that are typically presents and identifiable. They are fluff, failure to face the challenge, mistaking goals for strategy and bad strategic objectives (Rumelt, 2011). The elements create bad strategy, because they ultimately do not provide a real framework for accomplishing the goals that they are trying to achieve. In the book Rumelt states that bad strategy can generate a feeling of “dull annoyance” I would submit that it is more dangerous than that. In most of the examples given in the book the outcomes of bad strategies being employed were typically catastrophic for the organizations that employed the strategy (Cassell, 2022). Decision Model How do my decision models aid / hinder this process and why? I currently employ the Prescriptive Decision-making model over the Normative or Descriptive making models. The model incorporates the advantages of the Normative model while simultaneously minimizing the disadvantages of the Descriptive Model (Gati et al., 2019).

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SETTING DIRECTION 4 The Prescriptive model matches my personality, but this model does hinder me with regards to having a swing for the fences mentality. My decisions often give way to the pragmatic and attainable, instead of the ambitious (Cassell, 2022). What other decision models are being considered and why? I have considered other decision models in the past, this normally coincided with hearing of the success of some person or organization. As I have said before though, my personality is conservative and the other decision-making models, that granted can have dramatic upsides would leave me with quite a bit of angst. I am from a small town in Kansas and the Prescriptive model aligns with the adage “Pigs get fed; Hogs get slaughtered.” I am comfortable giving up huge upsides for a minimization of risk (Cassell, 2022). Conclusion Setting the direction of a company and the decision-making models that go into determining a strategy for that direction are complicated tasks. This post has examined the difference between “Good Strategy” and “Bad Strategy” and the Normative, Descriptive, and Prescriptive decision-making models. There is still an abundance of research that needs to be done in this area (Cassell, 2022).

SETTING DIRECTION 5 References Cassell, D. (2022) Strategy Development, Strategy Decisions, and Decision Models [Unpublished Discussion]. Liberty University. Gati, I., Levin, N., & Landman-Tal, S. (2019). Decision-Making Models and Career Guidance. International Handbook Of Career Guidance , 115-145. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25153-6_6 Rumelt, R. (2011). Good strategy, bad strategy . Crown Business. Whittle, A., & Carter, C. (2020). Making strategy critical? Part II: Strategy redux – Macro perspectives. Critical Perspectives On Accounting , 73 , 102262. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2020.102262

SETTING DIRECTION 6 Annotated Bibliography Gati, I., Levin, N., & Landman-Tal, S. (2019). Decision-Making Models and Career Guidance. International Handbook Of Career Guidance , 115-145. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25153-6_6 This article addressed various decision-making models as it related to career guidance. It explored three primary decision-making models. Normative, Descriptive, and Prescriptive decision models were analyzed and described with their pros and cons based on how the decision within each of the models was made. The beginning of the article focuses on the types of career decisions that can be made and are being made. Next the article actually gets into the decision- making theories in detail. This detail not only includes a definition of the theories but also a comparison of the theories to one another. This article was used primarily because the discussion asked about personal decision-making models. The fourth section of the article explores the PIC model of decision making which is a Prescriptive model. PIC is an acronym for “ Prescreening, In-depth exploration, and Choice”, and how it applies to current models in vocational psychology. The final part of the article addresses criticism of the various models presented and makes the case for why the decision models are valid for the type of personal decision making that is being studied. In the final section the article also aims to explore how the proposed decision theories can impact the fields of career guidance and counseling. Rumelt, R. (2011). Good strategy, bad strategy . Crown Business.

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SETTING DIRECTION 7 This book is one of the texts for this class, while it is hard to provide a full synopsis of the book itself due to not having read it in its entirety yet. The description of this book will only encompass the first seven chapters of this book and how it informed the discussion. The beginning of the book talks about how good strategy is often surprising, though not for the reasons one would expect. People often think that good strategy is innovative, and groundbreaking, but Rumelt makes the case that some of the best good strategies have come from implementing tried and true basic business practices. Chapters three and four focus on the subject of bad strategy, more specifically what is bad strategy defined as, examples of bad strategy and why there is so much bad strategy that is employed. The book then turns back to good strategy in chapters five to seven giving more examples of companies that employed good strategy and going over specific ideas of good strategy like using leverage and proximate objectives. This text provided the basis for the overall discussion of setting the direction of the company. Strategy is at the core of setting a company’s direction and there is no way to discuss the subject without it. Whittle, A., & Carter, C. (2020). Making strategy critical? Part II: Strategy redux – Macro perspectives. Critical Perspectives On Accounting , 73 , 102262. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpa.2020.102262 This article was the second part of a two-part article on the strategy. In this second part the article starts with the explanation of the concepts that are discussed in the article. It then goes on to make the assertion that strategy should be viewed as a political process and the introduction of power into the strategic process. Strategic process is largely the entire first part of the article. There is a brief section that outlines what the author refers to as the “death of planning” this part

SETTING DIRECTION 8 of the article talks about some concepts that are similar to the Rumelt text. It talks about vague, incoherent strategy that is often overly complicated and hard to understand much like the fluff component of bad strategy according to Rumelt. Finally the paper considers the various strategies from the referenced papers to try and explain why many strategies fail, although no consensus is made on the subject. Instead, this article is mainly a call to research the area of strategy. It makes no conclusions about the validity of one strategy or the other. This paper allows for the reader to either come to their own conclusions regarding strategy or to research the area more. This article focused mostly on political strategy but is relevant since in politics you typically have to create both social and economic blueprints for success.

Week 2 DT Setting Direction, Advantages Disadvantages, and Decision Models

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