LO1-Appreciate the complex nature of the decision-making process and the role that decision analysis tools can play in supporting business decisions.

 University of Lincoln Assessment Framework

Assessment Briefing 2022-2023

[This is the full assessment brief. It includes further description of the assessment materials. A SUMMARY of this assessment brief is also available.]

Module Code & Title: Managerial Decision Making MGT9703M Contribution to Final Module Mark: 100%

The TWO tasks for your portfolio:

1- Complete Assessments 1a and 1b and 1c.Aim for 1500 words.

2- Complete a report analysing the business decisions for either ONE of the following examples. Aim for 2000 words.

Overall – your portfolio has a word count target of 3500 words +/- 10%

TASK 1 further information:

Complete Tasks 1a and 1b and 1c – submit within ONE document.

[PLEASE REFER TO SEPARATE ASSIGNMENT BRIEFS ON BLACKBOARD FOR EACH TASK]

Consider that writing critically - is about building on your existing skills to be able to present strong insights into the topic area you are looking at. So you need to be able to:

  • Understanding and comprehend that topic – understand the key points, assumptions, and arguments
  • Analyse that topic– thinking about how these key points fit together and relate to each other
  • Compare those key points – explore how they are similar or different
  • Synthesise – bring together different sources and information and understanding to help analyse and compare those key points. You will be making connections between the different sources and help you shape your thoughts and support your ideas and views in your writing.
  • Evaluate the breadth of a topic– Assess the worth of a view or an idea in terms of its relevance to your needs and purpose in your writing. Do you think the view or idea is very important to your discussion? How? In what ways? Consider the evidence upon which those ideas or views are based and how it relates to other relevant ideas or views you have read about.
  • Apply your understanding – use your evaluation to help you address questions and tasks in the same area
  • Justify – use the thinking you have developed by doing the steps above to develop arguments, draw conclusions, make inferences, and identify implications.

(Adapted from the Open University (2013)).

You can find further help from the university guides on critical thinking here.

You may also find it helpful to think further on two important areas when developing your critical thinking skills:

1- Question the data

Always consider the evidence about any issue you are exploring. Think about how valid the data is? How reliable is it? Was it gathered in a robust and repeatable manner? Views coming out of an issue you are exploring need to be supported and substantiated; theories proven; references, facts and bias checked; and research methods investigated.

If you think and write like this – you are exhibiting the skills of a critical thinker.

2- Recognising bias

Value free research does not exist in the social sciences. Research always draws upon preferred views of data and evidence and you write about those views to support your own thinking about a topic. This is not necessarily a problem but is something you need to consider in how you write and how you interpret the work of others. 

Learning Outcomes Assessed in Task 1

All the work you submit for assessment will be guided by how it helps you to demonstrate that you understand and have relevant level skills, for the topic you are studying.

For this first assessment task in your portfolio, the learning outcomes are as follows (in other words – this is the learning you will be demonstrating in your essay):

LO1-Appreciate the complex nature of the decision-making process and the role that decision analysis tools can play in supporting business decisions.

LO2-Synthesise and critically evaluate applications of decision analysis tools from multiple literature sources in accordance with sound principles of research and academic writing.

LO3 -Systematically structure and analyse decision problems in order to reach logical conclusions

LO4 -Apply appropriate decision tools analysis and effectively communicate the results

What skills and knowledge will I have achieved after completing task 1

Securing a passing mark (>50%) will mean that you have demonstrated the following:

Subject Specific Knowledge, Skills and Understanding: Literature searching, Referencing, Subject-specific knowledge.

Professional Graduate Skills: independence and personal responsibility, written communication, critical thinking, working under pressure to meet deadlines

Emotional Intelligence: motivation, resilience, self-confidence.

How will my work be assessed?

Marking criteria are generic descriptions of how you demonstrate you have achieved the learning outcomes. The University Of Lincoln has an agreed set of descriptions (that follow) which are then adapted specifically to this first task.

The detailed assessment criteria for this task are as follows (based upon the above generic postgraduate descriptors). These are sometimes called rubrics too.

TASK 2

Module Code & Title: Managerial Decision Making MGT9703M Description of Assessment Task and Purpose:

Recap - summary portfolio tasks:

1- Complete a report analysing the business decisions in ONE of the provided company synopses (examples). Aim for 2500 words.

Task 2  Further information:

You are required to write a report that analyses the business/management decisions in one of the summary examples presented.

YOU MUST START YOUR ANALYSIS WITH A CYNEFIN EVALUATION OF THE DECISION MAKING ENVIRONMENT.

You may NOT vary from choosing one of the presented choices .

This contributes 60% of the final grade for the portfolio submission.

  • The presented summaries are outlined in synopsis form to help guide you towards decision making issues and topics in those organisations and their environments. THESE ARE NOT COMPLETE CASE STUDIES. YOU ARE EXPECTED TO UNDERTAKE YOUR OWN RESEARCH TO DEVELOP YOUR KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING OF THE DECISION-MAKING PROBLEM PRESENTED.

• The summaries do NOT include all known information and should NOT be used as the only source of your information.

Scope of topics discussed in the module for Task 2

The following is a listing of decision-making topics that are engaged with during the module and from which you can explore decision making themes in the summaries presented.

  • Decision Audit
  • Decision Types
  • VJY Decision Making
  • Organized Anarchies
  • Garbage Can Model of Decision Making
    • Broad perspectives on the approaches to decision making – RATIONAL, ADMINISTRATIVE and BARGAINING (POLITICAL)
    • Rationality
    • Decision Making (DM) styles
    • Power
    • Post modern view of power
    • Non linear thinking
    • Invariant evidence (incl. cognitive paradoxes)
    • Certainty
    • Expected Utility
    • Marginal Utility
    • Expected Value (EV or sometimes Expected Monetary Value)
    • Psychodynamic Decision Making
    • Cognitive dissonance Decision Making
    • Behaviouralism Decision Making
    • Humanism Decision Making
    • Schemas and types
    • Heuristics
    • Ethical decision making
    • Consequentialist Decision Making (CDM) (This is sometimes called utilitarianism).
    • Deonotological decision making (DDM)
    • Virtue decision making (VDM)
    • Simple/Tame decisions
    • Decision Analysis
    • States of nature
    • Decision Trees
    • Messy Problems
    • Wicked problems
    • Problems with discrete solution sets
    • Problems with very large solution sets
    • Probability
    • Decision Trees and logic
    • Expected Monetary Value
    • Expected Utility
    • Cumulative Risk Profile
    • Sensitivity (one and two way)
    • Certainty Equivalence
    • Bayesian Revision
    • Risk Averse / Happy (Conservative / Optimistic Decision maker)
    • Data forecasting and modelling (linear and non linear)
    • Soft Systems Analysis
    • Factors shaping operational and strategic decisions
    • Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

TASK 2 CHOICES

A- Decisions about pay and working terms and conditions – varying Tech. companies

B- Decisions and tensions about ethical Investments in Banking- Standard Chartered

C- Decisions about location and relocation choices for Boeing - Boeing

D- Decisions about monetizing of Twitter by an entrepreneur (Musk) – Elon Musk

E- Decisions about being flexible in making choices under uncertainty- Hubspot

A) Making HR pay choices post pandemic? (2021- Current) (This summary outlines an increasingly considered HR choice for many organisations post pandemic. You can evaluate this choice).

Summary -Google is the most recent tech employer to plan to potentially cut the pay of employees choosing to work 100% remotely post Covid-19. Their compensation would be based on where they live, not the office they were once attached to. Others in tech such as Facebook o

Twitter and some law companies have now announced similar plans. Some companies however have decided to go the other way and have said salaries could also be adjusted up.

Are greedy companies taking away from workers who`ve given their all during and post the pandemic and putting families and marginalized employees living in cheaper areas at a disadvantage? Why would some of the world’s most famous companies decide that reducing remote workers` pay was their best option? Even those experienced with Google, feel this could be a very poor decision.

To decide whether Google`s move is fair consider the impact of globalised capitalism. Two google employees – one is on a higher salary than another, supported in their use of remote working and relocation which because of this secures more family support. The other worker on a similar salary but different role in Google and at the top of their scale asks and is refused a pay rise. Local resentment grows at the apparent benefits of one worker from working at home with that of another worker. This situation is surfaced every time there is a Zoom meeting with workers dispersed across geography but on similar pay salaries but potentially different salary bandings.

For centuries work was conditioned on showing up to a particular field, factory, or office, so pay ranges vary by location. They`re designed to attract the right candidates where the company needs them to be. It`s not the cost of living employers consider; it`s the cost of talent. The two are only partially related.

Companies will pay what it takes to attract and retain people in a particular market. It`s the cost of a software engineer that matters, not the cost of a one-bedroom flat. Put differently, an employer cares what you and people like you will accept, not what you need to live on.

Cost of living is not the real focus – it is the value of the context of the worker. Salary is based not on worker needs or created value but on what it would cost to replace the worker. Internationally mobile employees have experienced this for years. Expatriate contracts are a thing of the past. A worker moving countries is usually asked to give up their existing deal and sign again under local law - and local pay rates.

If a worker wants to move bad enough, they accept the pay cut. A smart organisation may absorb the difference into a promotion, moving the employee to a new pay band so they don`t feel the pain so instead of getting a pay cut they didn`t deserve, they don`t see a pay rise they did earn. It makes sense psychologically, if not financially. The colonial undertones of an overpaid expat class are falling out of fashion, and some think rightly so. It`s no fairer than asking an immigrant to undercut the local minimum wage.

Fundamentally, is the problem that capitalism has a location-based compensation system for increasingly location-independent work? This is requiring some companies like Reddit and Zillow to decide to pay everyone the same. Such blanket policies – where pay rates are applied regardless of employee context do not seem to solve any of the employer concerns about remote working – which tend to cluster around perceived productivity differences. Aligning pay globally for a large multinational company though, would be a legal and logistical nightmare. For Google with 135,000 full-time employees, such levelling up across the board would cost hundreds of millions.

In the longer term, as knowledge work becomes disconnected from location, so, too, could professional pay scales. If workers insist they can work anywhere, corporations could insist it can be done by anyone. This can create significant ethical and decision difficulties as such choices made by workers and employers often revolving around the unique situation of the worker, the nature of the power relationship between the skills and value of the worker in a labour market and assumptions about those skills and their availability but which could then lead to situations of illegal discrimination. 

Decision Making Themes you could consider IN ADDITION TO CYNEFIN:

  • Situational complexity of decision making (CYNEFIN)
  • Balancing priorities in ethical decision making]
  • Ethical decision making frameworks
  • Leadership and structuring decisions
  • Making hard decisions within complex situations
    • VJY Decision Making
    • Rationality
    • Non-linear thinking
    • Cognitive dissonance Decision Making
    • Humanism Decision Making
    • Risk Averse / Happy (Conservative / Optimistic Decision maker)
    • Soft Systems Analysis
    • Factors shaping operational and strategic decisions
    • Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)
B) Making ethical investment choices in Banking? This summary outlines the situational context within which choices are being made. You would be evaluating this situation.

Summary: In 2010, Standard Chartered (StanChart) adopted a new slogan: “Here for good.”

Now, just as Google had before, with its “Don’t be evil” mantra, the bank is finding it hard to reconcile its values with its business in some parts of the world, including China. Like its larger rival HSBC, StanChart is struggling to balance its commercial dependence on China against its London headquarters and its reliance on US dollars. The internal debate is sharpening amid rising geopolitical tensions and increased pressure from investors on environmental, social and governance issues.

Recently, the board debated its approach to government relations where China and human rights featured prominently in both discussions, according to people familiar with the meetings. Attendees were reported as questioning whether, by continuing to do business with Chinese state firms accused of human rights violations in Xinjiang, StanChart was living up to its brand promise of “here for good”.

Some board members expressed concern that this exposed the bank to reputational risk. However, greater China is StanChart’s most important regional market, accounting for four-fifths of its 2020 profit. StanChart’s strategy for now remains to tread lightly and avoid provoking the Chinese government. However, the bank is increasingly being forced to pick sides

In June 2020, when asked about Hong Kong, the bank crafted a statement that stated “We believe the national security law can help maintain the long-term economic and social stability of Hong Kong”, it said, adding that the “one country, two systems” principle should be maintained. This view was criticised internally and externally however.

Hong Kong and mainland China are fundamental to the bank’s business and the bank has stated it will comply with all relevant laws and regulations and seek to engage constructively and be a force for good wherever possible. The bank has also faced recent difficulties about its ethical choices when conducting business in Saudi Arabia but have been anxious about relations with its main profit engine, China. Recent difficulties forced the bank to close all embassy accounts which was indicative of the challenges of running an international bank that straddles east and west during resurgent superpower tensions. It also reflects concerns about operating in an increasingly strict regulatory environment in which StanChart is one of the main intermediaries between China, Africa and the Middle East, and international capital markets.

The bank’s view of the decision to close embassy accounts was difficult and would create problems but a view was taken that this was better than becoming involved in potential political problems that accompany embassy operations. It was reported as a business decision, not a political one – but such an interpretation is arguably selective..

For some, this decision was part of a trend that began a decade ago, when many international lenders including JPMorgan closed the accounts of foreign government officials because of the opacity of embassy and diplomatic money flows and the embassies’ reticence to provide detailed information.

Senior figures within the bank have also responded that criticism against them ignores the recent history of autocratic British colonialism in Hong Kong. It also overlooks other industries’ close ties with authoritarian regimes in Asia and the Middle East, including asset management firms and the political establishment itself. They suggest that a wider review of the complex reality of global and geopolitical business should be taken and used to frame choices. Indeed, a wider view of the nature of current relations between UK financial firms and China arguably suggests choices made by those firms reflect the changed geopolitical relationship between London and Beijing which is one now characterised by military tensions and scrutinised economic relations, with the US looking on.

Decision Making Themes you could consider IN ADDITION TO CYNEFIN:

  • Situational complexity of decision making (CYNEFIN)
  • Balancing priorities in ethical decision making]
  • Ethical decision making frameworks
  • Leadership and structuring decisions
  • Making hard decisions within complex situations
    • Decision Types
    • VJY Decision Making
      • Broad perspectives on the approaches to decision making – RATIONAL, ADMINISTRATIVE and BARGAINING (POLITICAL)
      • Power
      • Post modern view of power
      • Cognitive dissonance Decision Making
      • Consequentialist Decision Making (CDM) (This is sometimes called utilitarianism).
      • Deontological decision making (DDM)
      • Virtue decision making (VDM)
      • Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

Helpful starting sources 

  • Morris, S(2021). StanChart tries to navigate moral minefield. Financial Times 7th March, 2021]
  • Leoni, Z (2022). The End of the “Golden Era”? The Conundrum of Britain`s China Policy Amidst Sino-American Relations. Journal of Current Chinese Affairs. https://doi.org/10.1177/18681026221090315

C) Deciding where to be? – Boeing’s decision to relocate its headquarters.(2022- Current). This summary focuses upon a re-locational decision and the reasons for it. You would be evaluating this choice.

Summary –Boeing has taken the historic decision to transplant its corporate headquarters from Chicago to Arlington, Virginia. It is a choice not without fervent criticism for a number of reasons including the strategic choice to prioritise its defence and military operations over its civilian commercial activities.

In the wake of the 737 Max difficulties, many stakeholders believe the company should in fact be prioritising the commercial activities to rebuild confidence and investment. “It’s being perceived as an abandonment of the commercial aviation part of the company,” said Ray Goforth, executive director of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, which represents more than 14,000 Boeing employees and some view this as a focus on supporting investors over engineering excellence. It is also hard to see how Boeing did not have already enough lobbying influence with the Government prior to this locational move.

Boeing has a history of shifting its headquarters, from Seattle to Chicago in 2001, four years after merging with McDonnell Douglas. The new relocation puts its headquarters a mile from the Pentagon noting that the company’s defence business brings in more revenue than its commercial arm. However, this trend is not uncommon in aerospace companies where four of the top 5 US such firms are now based in the Washington DC suburbs (these include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and new starters like SpaceX). So is this decision, simply the outcome of Boeing responding to business locational pressures or the start of a strategic refocus for the company and a realignment of its economic and political interests?

Let’s consider come other factors to add a little more context to this decision situation - Boeing revealed (April 2022) it had incurred $1.2bn in charges in the first three months of the year, including $660mn related to the production of two Air Force One jets, the US presidential aircraft. On the civil side, the company announced a further delay to its wide-body 777X aircraft to 2025, projected to cost another $1.5bn. Boeing is also making slower than expected progress on clearing an order backlog of hundreds of 737 Max jets that built up during the aircraft’s global grounding after two crashes in 2018 and 2019. Meanwhile, customer deliveries of the wide-body 787 Dreamliner remain on hold following quality-control issues. These bad news factors drove down the company’s share value by 40 per cent since January unlike the other top 5 defence companies whose values have risen this year (post the Russian invasion of Ukraine) and top civilian rival Airbus has a commanding sales lead with its A320 jets.

Is the relocation of headquarters just a plaster over the cracks of more serious operational difficulties? Does it pander to potential investors rather than get to grips with deeper problems? These are some of the expressed concerns - Dómhnal Slattery, boss of the world’s second-largest lessor, Avolon, said at an industry conference this month (May 2022) that the company had “lost its way”. It needed to “fundamentally reimagine its strategic relevance in the marketplace”, he said, adding that this would require “fresh vision, maybe fresh leadership”. Boeing’s relentless production issues were “just the absence of leadership at the top”, said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace consultant at AeroDynamic Advisory. He added that he was “baffled by the lack of a plan” for the company.

 Other long-term watchers have suggested the company might decide to demerge its commercial arm from its defence business to survive.

What is clear though is that the relocation decision will be critical if Boeing is to both enhance its defence relationships and return to being a reliable commercial partner for global airlines.

Decision Making Themes you could consider IN ADDITION TO CYNEFIN:

  • Situational complexity of decision making (CYNEFIN)
  • Leadership and structuring decisions
  • Decision making styles
  • Locational Decisions
  • Making hard decisions within complex situations
  • Politics and bargaining in decision making
    • Decision Types and Leadership
    • VJY Decision Making
    • Decision Making (DM) styles
    • Power
    • Decision Trees and logic
    • Factors shaping operational and strategic decisions 

D) ELON MUSK and the monetization and strategic direction of Twitter?

Summary – Elon Musk’s reputation for a harsh leadership style and aggressive decision making were earned during his development of Tesla, SpaceX. The Boring Company and Neuralink. His acquisition of Twitter on October 27 2022, followed many months of protracted, lengthy and often difficult negotiations. Critically, this poses many questions about the decision to purchase the social medium platform.

A cursory review of Elon’s management decisions shows his disregard for established business norms and procedures:

  • June 2022, about 500 workers from Tesla’s Giga factory in Sparks, Nevada, were laid off but without apparently sufficient notice being given to the workers [thus violating California’s Warn Act (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification), which requires 60-day advance notice as well as pay and benefits for that period.
  • In 2017, Musk announced that the soon-to-be-released Tesla vehicles would have hardware that would eventually allow the cars to drive itself, which was not previously agreed within the company. Is this policy making by public announcement?
  • He maintains a high work ethic and expects that from all his employees and if they don’t like it, they can leave. This was a 2018 announcement of expecting his staff to work between 80-100 hours a week.
  • The dissolution of the Tesla Public Relations Department in 2020 (and which pre-empted the same decision for Twitter in November 2022.
  • November 2022, nearly half of the Twitter’s workforce were laid off with little notice, prompting a class action lawsuit by some alleging Musk violated California labour law.
  • Twitter is also facing a second complaint filed on behalf of a group of contractors who also allege they were not given notice before they were terminated.
  • Tesla required its employees to “renew their vows” and sign new confidentiality agreements in 2018 that barred them from speaking with the media. The confidentiality agreement was the subject of a legal challenge from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for violating workers’ rights.
  • November 2022, Musk gave Twitter employees 24 hrs to decide if they wanted to stay or take 3 months severance (an estimated 1200 staff left leaving gaps in the coverage of the Twitter functions).
  • A further November lawsuit followed in the US where new lawsuit on Thursday, ahead of the deadline (noted above), the company’s requirement to come into the office and put in long hours at a high intensity violates the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
  • November 2022, Musk announced he expected to reduce his involvement in Twitter when he can find someone else to run it. This was subsequently confirmed by his very public poll
  • Musk is also known for firing staff who publically criticize him, although this might now be through Twitter’s inhouse social media platform, Slack.

Musk had, until the acquisition of Twitter, used that social media platform as a megaphone to promote himself and his companies.

Bus what are the reasons for his decision to buy Twitter?

  • Does his new acquisition help or hinder his businesses and wider view of what capitalism means for a man who arguably does not care about regulators than hamper the progress of his companies and his ideas?
  • What does a business magnate more famous for pushing technological outcomes and boundaries seek to achieve by this decision in the social media space? How will his leadership add strategic value to Twitter and its development?

Twitter, as a business investment looks a poor strategic choice as its advertising revenue has never come close to its potential. So, is the Musk decision one to protect free speech and to offer a captive conduit to shape capitalism in his interests and eyes or part of a wider redevelopment of business practices that are efficient, competitive and necessary?

Decision Making Themes you could consider IN ADDITION TO CYNEFIN:

  • Situational complexity of decision making (CYNEFIN)
  • Leadership and structuring decisions
    • Decision Types
    • VJY Decision Making
    • Organized Anarchies
    • Garbage Can Model of Decision Making
      • Broad perspectives on the approaches to decision making – RATIONAL, ADMINISTRATIVE and BARGAINING (POLITICAL)
      • Rationality
      • Decision Making (DM) styles
      • Power
      • Post modern view of power
      • Non linear thinking
      • Invariant evidence (incl. cognitive paradoxes)
      • Psychodynamic Decision Making
      • Cognitive dissonance Decision Making
      • Behaviouralism Decision Making
      • Humanism Decision Making
      • Schemas and types
      • Heuristics
      • Ethical decision making
      • Consequentialist Decision Making (CDM) (This is sometimes called utilitarianism).
      • Deonotological decision making (DDM)
      • Virtue decision making (VDM)
      • Decision Analysis
      • States of nature
      • Messy Problems
      • Wicked problems
      • Risk Averse / Happy (Conservative / Optimistic Decision maker)
      • Data forecasting and modelling (linear and non linear)
      • Soft Systems Analysis
      • Factors shaping operational and strategic decisions
      • Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

E) Being flexible in making choices under uncertainty (2021-present)

Yamini Rangan of software company HubSpot, found herself tasked with assuming a replacement CEO role when the founder and then CEO of the company Brian Halligan, 54, broke 20 bones in a snowmobile accident. Rangan was asked to take charge for an indefinite period. For HubSpot – there was a real risk of a “leadership vacuum” . Looking back, Rangan, says “You don’t have decisiveness, you don’t have someone to make a decision, to call what’s important.”

Only a year into her original post of chief customer officer, the Indian-born executive then realised a conscious change in style was needed. Sometimes, in the past, she said she had “just run from one job to the other, one transition to the other, not quite being reflective, thoughtful and deliberate”. Rangan described that the key was to consciously fit the management style to the needs of the moment. “You cannot and should not assume whatever has worked for you in the past is going to continue to work for you in the future,” she says. Remarkably, this shift in responsibilities occurred in the midst of the pandemic and a boom in the software business. The critical lesson was of “how adaptable and flexible you have to be in uncertain times,” she says, but the stress and strain on decision makers is high.

“I felt, both personally and as a company, we’ve really flexed and flexed, there were points where it felt like you’re going to break,” she says. “And then we’ve been able to come back up.” That resilience she says, has been “sometimes draining, really draining”. When Brian Halligan was ready to return, he opted for a position as full-time chair thus confirming his stand-in as the permanent CEO.

Rangan reflects that her rise to the CEO post of a $30bn valued company was difficult. Different values systems and beliefs between her home in India and her studies in and career development in the US forced “a huge cultural adaptation”. Equally fitting in with a new business culture also brought uncomfortable compromises. “I was always the different person in the room,” she says. Her first response was to copy what others were doing, before gaining the confidence in the past decade to set her own terms: “This is not authentic, this is not who I am. I don’t like golf. So I’m not going to learn golf.”

In the immediate crisis that followed Halligan’s accident, Rangan focused on two things: a united leadership group and decisiveness. It meant getting all the top executives to be open. Getting people involved in uncertain times is critical to decision success. “When you’re a new team, and you have a new kind of interim leader, the question is, what are you going to share? What are you not going to share?” After that, it was about “making sure that we made decisions quickly, and then communicate the ‘why’. Those were the things that are needed in any leadership vacuum.”

It is all a stark contrast to the role Rangan was originally hired for. An engineer who had devoured the lessons from a decade spent at the more mature software companies Workday and Dropbox, she was brought in to instil some of the same disciplines at the fast-growing HubSpot. She calls it “pattern recognition” — having the experience to recognise, from the data, how a company is running and what adjustments are needed for the next stage in its development. Fine-tuning data- driven businesses like this is both art and science, says Rangan.

Rangan introduced new performance metrics focused upon revenue retention rate, a key measure in the software industry. This “… measures customers that join the company, that stay with the company, that get value with the company, and continue to buy from the company. It’s core.” The additional uncertainty of the pandemic, when it hit, brought the need for an altogether different management style. The company was thrown on to a “wartime” footing, she says, forcing it to react quickly to help customers who themselves were facing a crisis.

Living in the San Francisco bay area when most of HubSpot’s operations are on the East Coast, so this and the pandemic required new techniques of remote management for hybrid working. The strains of the pandemic, and of finding new ways to work, have also brought a recognition that deeper changes are needed. At the company level, Friday has become a day without any meetings, to encourage “reading and reflecting and making time for thoughtful decisions.” It is a point underscored by research from Alexander et al (2020).

Rangan concludes by recognising that there is a scarcity of women running software companies, “We don’t have enough of us, that’s a real issue. We need to have the floodgates open and have a pretty big shift in terms of the number of women — the number of people of colour — in leadership positions.”

Decision Making Themes you could consider IN ADDITION TO CYNEFIN:

  • Situational complexity of decision making (CYNEFIN)
  • Decision Types
  • VJY Decision Making
  • Garbage Can Model of Decision Making
  • Rationality
  • Cynefin Framework
  • Decision Making (DM) styles
  • Power
  • Post modern view of power
  • Non linear thinking
  • Cognitive dissonance Decision Making
  • Behaviouralism in Decision Making
  • Humanism Decision Making
  • Simple/Tame decisions
  • Messy Problems
  • Wicked problems

Helpful starting sources 

Corporate website: https://www.hubspot.com/

organizational-performance/our-insights/decision-making-in-uncertain-times September 2022.

PREPARING YOUR REPORT:

Your aim in writing your report is to use one of the case contexts (or your own applied focus ) to practice and reflect upon the value of identified decision tools to support managerial (operational and strategic) decision making. It is expected that your work will draw upon an extensive literature review of relevant, diverse and contemporary sources explored in an applied context.

The Layout of your Report

  • A title page
    • An executive summary – which states the aim, methodology and outcomes of the report (aim for 100-150 words).
    • An introduction – this frames the report and its scope (aim for 100-150 words)
      • The main body of the work – using your identified decision tools to support your analysis of identified problems (1500-1700 words)
      • conclusion – where you reflect on the tasks and your argument for the organisation concerned (100-200 words)

Please note: the title page, executive summary, headings in the main report, your full references list and any appendices (if necessary) –are not counted in the word count for this assessment task.

Subheadings are a requirement and must be numbered.

Write in full sentences and construct paragraphs around the issues you discuss. You can use bullet-point format sometimes, but try not to rely on this too much as it can restrict your ability to analyse.

Learning Outcomes Assessed in Task 2

All the work you submit for assessment will be guided by how it helps you to demonstrate that you understand and have relevant level skills, for the topic you are studying.

For this second assessment task in your portfolio, the learning outcomes are as follows (in other words – this is the learning you will be demonstrating in your essay):

LO3 Systematically structure and analyse decision problems in order to reach logical conclusions

LO4 Apply appropriate decision tools analysis and effectively communicate the results

What skills and knowledge will I have after task 2?

Securing a passing mark (>50%) will mean that you have demonstrated the following

Subject Specific Knowledge, Skills and Understanding: Literature searching, Referencing, Subject-specific knowledge.

Professional Graduate Skills: independence and personal responsibility, written communication, critical thinking, working under pressure to meet deadlines Emotional Intelligence: motivation, resilience, self-confidence.

Format for Assessment

This should be approximately 2500 words in overall length. Use the font Arial or Times New Roman -size 12. 1.5 spacing and single sided.

Paginate your work with margins at least 2.54 to the left and right justified. Ensure you use Harvard referencing conventions.

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