« Sunshine. Beach. Safari. And A Bit Of Work. | Main | Atoms of Business Intelligence »
March 19, 2007
Dealing with Dilemmas Part IV
In Dealing with Dilemmas Part I, Dealing with Dilemmas Part II, Dealing with Dilemmas Part III and Kobayashi Maru, I did discuss -- well obviously -- how managers should deal with dilemmas.
A dilemma is a difficult choice of some sort. Managers typically dont like dilemmas and feel trapped. In many cases this is not necessary, many dilemmas turn out to be false dilemmas. We do not have to EITHER outsource OR not, centralize OR decentralize, control costs OR fuel for growth. In many cases we can do both at the same time. Sometimes because there is a synthesis possible between the two, as I did describe on on our BI Website. But in many more cases the dilemma turns out to be false because no one said it had to be 100% either/or. You can outsource a little bit, but not everything. You can standardize, but not on one single platform, etc you get my drift. IN general, not all budget you have (in terms of time and money) has to be spent on one choice, you can invest in a portfolio of choices. Each of the components in the portfolio addresses a part of the desired result, without hitting the dominants disadvantage of the either/or option. In other words, you decompose both sides of the dilemma into smaller parts, and recompose them not as a single either/or choice, but as a set of smaller and/and choices, avoiding the false dilemma altogether.
There is actually quite some economic background in portfolio theory. Check this link.
Best regards, frank
Posted by Frank Buytenkijk at March 19, 2007 5:58 AM
