Making Better Business Decisions: A Simple Tool
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“How should I grow my business?” “How should I compensate my new employee who is taking over a significant and important part of the business?” “How should I…?”
Here is a simple process that always helps: Develop options.
When planning a building, architects will develop several schematics. Each is a complete option for using the space and each will help the owner meet his critical needs and all or most of his wants.
In other words when the architect asks “How should we build this building?” they answer with several distinct possibilities. One option may be five large floors with a small garden area. Another may be ten smaller floors with a large garden area and a parking lot. A third may use the lot for two buildings with underground parking and roof-top gardens. They won’t try to draw one picture that incorporates aspects of each. That would be a mess, not a plan.
Yet in business we often do just that. We ask, for example, “How should I market my business?” What we should do is work out three, four or five options, each a full picture in its own right. Instead we seek out the “perfect” solution and desperately try to force together pieces that just don’t fit. The result is a mess.
Next time you are unsure as to how to move ahead:
- Write out your objectives. What are the results you aim to achieve?
- Develop some options – each a full possible way forward. None will be perfect; there’s no such thing as a perfect option. Generating options helps you spot hidden assumptions.
- Eliminate the relatively weak ones and improve the remaining ones until you have one option left.
© Dov Gordon, 2009. All rights reserved.
DOV GORDON coaches small company owners who are at a crossroads and need to make difficult choices. His Small Company Coaching Clubs meet in Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh. Subscribe to Dov’s The CEO Thought-Provoker™ at www.IsraeliCEO.com. Contact by email: dovgordon@gmail.com or phone: +972-(0)2-992-0396.
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