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My campus is not alone in having a battle about the decision to bring back students to campus, although the decision has already been made and students are back. Arguments for the reopening stress the need to move the students forward in their academic journeys, unsatisfactory results with remote instruction in the spring and financial implications of lost enrollments, decreased tuitions, and idle facilities.
Less than three weeks after floating the concept of a Pandemic-proof™ schedule for sports leagues, React LLC (“React”), creators of the Super Squares® live mobile game show, today released a “ready for prime time” schedule for the 2020 NFL season. React partnered with Reston, Virginia’s Definitive Business Solutions, Inc. (“Definitive”) to optimize the framework first introduced on July 21st.
Putting together the Marlins’ daily game plan is a group effort that includes input from the coaching staff, scouting reports and the analytics department. Coaching and scouting have been traditional staples in the Marlins’ decision-making process. But in the past three years, the analytics department has had more say than ever before in club history. Now, they are using a “line-up optimizer” to determine the best combination of players for a given game.
Being viewed as a smart decision-maker is a highly desirable trait for leaders. But no matter how smart leaders’ decisions turn out to be, there’s one mistake that drastically undermines their credibility and makes them look like bad decision-makers. And ironically, it’s not their decision-making process per se, but rather how they communicate their decisions.
Some researchers point to group decision-making processes or psychological traps that snare leaders into justification of unethical choices. Certainly those factors are at play, but they largely explain dishonest behavior at an individual level and I wondered about systemic factors that might influence whether or not people in organizations distort or withhold the truth from one another.
The biennial survey demonstrates continuous advancement of vital tools for decision-makers, managers and analysts. This year’s survey includes 28 software packages from 18 different vendors, domestic and international. Pricing for licenses varied, ranging from free products to a max of $100,000, depending on the user/license type and elements of the software package. Specific industries and markets for these software applications are widespread, including defense (military, aerospace and shipbuilding) healthcare (pharma, hospitals and clinics), energy-related domains (petroleum and nuclear energy), as well as many others. Definitive Pro™ is highlighted on pages 42 and 43.
Thomas L. Saaty, a world-renowned scholar, distinguished professor at the University of Pittsburgh, creator of the decision-making analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and analytic network process (ANP) and our advisory editor, passed away on Aug. 14, 2017 at the age of 91. Along with recognizing the one-year anniversary of his death, this tribute focuses on the last years of his life and his final work, with which many readers might not be familiar with.
Amazon.com has held advanced discussions about the possibility of opening its highly sought-after second headquarters in Crystal City, including how quickly it would move employees there, which buildings it would occupy and how an announcement about the move would be made to the public, according to people close to the process.
Many common corporate activities and thought processes actually promote mediocrity and inhibit needed business-model transformations, a new book contends. What if it turned out that best practices were not “best” after all? What if adhering to best practices actually signaled a company’s mediocrity? Those aren’t frivolous or absurd musings. They’re central tenets of a quite serious new book, “Detonate” (Wiley, May 2018). It aims to help organizations “spot traditional business activities that need to be questioned” during an era when business is increasingly defined by disruption.
When board members in big firms make critical decisions about their organisations, it is almost always behind closed doors. So exactly how and if senior leaders draw on big data factors in their decision-making is largely unexplained. Researchers studied top-level decisions by board managers at 19 organisations in manufacturing, finance, consultancy, IT and air travel. “Our study identified a shortfall in capabilities for dealing with the challenges of big data,” said Dr Ana Canhoto at Brunel Business School. “There is a gap in the knowledge and understanding organisations need, in order to avoid the cognitive biases and overloads big data can bring.”
