TITLE : MAKING MANAGEMENT DECISIONS. 2ND ED.

Making decisions and bearing the responsibility for them is one of the cornerstones of the manager's job. Quite simply, if managers did not make decisions they would not be managers! This fundamental importance of decision making is reflected in the attention shown to it by several academic disciplines. Philosophy, economics, mathematics and the social sciences have all contributed to better the understanding of how decisions are made, or ought to be made.

Among all this interest two academic areas stand out as offering particularly helpful contributions to the practical business of making better decisions. These areas are the behavioural sciences, which help us to understand how we and others behave when faced with a decision, and the applied mathematics of operational research, which provides potentially powerful tools for the modelling and analysis of complex decisions. Yet the full contribution of these two academic areas is only realized if they are focused through the reality of practical management experience. After all, decision making is an extremely practical business-in making a decision there must be the commitment actually to do something.

To understand management decision making and so hopefully make better decisions, one must be able to recognize different types of decision, understand the contribution of the behavioural and quantitative sciences and have a knowledge of the practical steps to be taken in making decisions.

The Second Edition

The material for the first edition was originally developed from our experience of running a post-graduate management programme. Since then we have had the opportunity to test out our model and to think through and develop our ideas further.

This has resulted in a number of changes in the second edition. Our basic decision model is simplified in terms of the number of steps it contains, and the idea of the cyclical process is emphasized rather more. We have also introduced the idea of decision making as being a process of expansion and contraction: expansion in those areas where exploration is required, contraction where the need is for initiation of events and of action.

We have also incorporated within Parts II and III suggestions for establishing the support processes necessary (in our view) for high-quality decision making, concentrating in the final part on working through the major stages of objective setting, understanding the problem, generating options, evaluation and choice.

Finally, it might be fair to say that we have chosen to be more prescriptive about our view of good practice where this has seemed to be appropriate. A consequence of this approach is that the statements at the end of each chapter shift from being a rather traditional 'summary' in Part I to 'practical prescriptions' in the remainder of the book.