Decision Analysis for Managers: A Guide for Making Better Personal and Business Decisions

  • 1h 49m
  • David Charlesworth
  • Business Expert Press
  • 2013

Everybody has to make decisions--they are unavoidable. Yet we receive little or no education or training on how to make decisions. Business decisions can be difficult: which people to hire, which product lines or facilities to expand and which to sell or shut down, which bid or proposal to accept, which process to implement, how much R&D to invest in, which environmental projects should receive the highest priority, etc. This book gives you all the tools you need to...

  • clarify and reach alignment on goals and objectives and understand trade-offs in reaching those goals,
  • develop and examine alternatives
  • systematically analyze the effects of risk and uncertainty, and
  • maximize the chances of achieving your goals and objectives.

Success (getting what you want) depends on luck and good decision making. You can't control your luck, but you can maximize your odds by making the best possible decisions, and this book gets you there. Broadly speaking, this book organizes and presents otherwise formal decision-making tools in an intuitively understandable fashion. The presentation is informal, but the concepts and tools are research-based and formally accepted.

About the Author

David Charlesworth is a licensed chemical engineer (State of Georgia), obtained his MBA from the University of Florida, and obtained a BS ChE from Indiana Tech.

In this Book

  • Decision Analysis for Managers—A Guide for Making Better Personal and Business Decisions
  • Preface
  • What Is Decision Analysis?—And Why Should I Care?
  • How to Start Framing a DA Problem—How Can We Work Together?
  • The Objectives Hierarchy—What Do We Want?
  • Decisions and Alternatives—What Can We Do?
  • Influence Diagrams—What Do We Know?
  • Uncertainty Assessment—The Boundary Between Known and Unknown
  • Building a Deterministic Model—Time to Run the Numbers
  • Tornado Diagrams—Figuring Out What Is Important
  • Cumulative Probability—Looking at the Range of Outcomes
  • Value of Information—How Much Is It Worth to Know?
  • Multiattribute Decision Analysis—There’s More to Life than Money
  • Other Topics—More Things to Think About
  • Notes
  • References
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