040115 KU Strategic Decision-Making (MA) (2018S)

Business resolves around making decisions. Leaders, managers, and everybody else frequently need to make important decisions, often with very limited information and under considerable uncertainty. The purpose of the class is to familiarize students with normative and descriptive approaches to decision making and to enable them to analyze and understand the challenges of decision making in organizations. The course will consist of a mixture of lectures, decision making exercises and case studies. During the class we will talk about fundamental decision making concepts and then discuss them in the context of typical management decisions in organizations. We will focus in particular on the challenges for strategic decision making in organizations that are posed by uncertainty and the different approaches how decision makers can deal with them.

Introduce students to the analytic concepts necessary to understand and analyze management decision making in different contexts

Help students to understand and appreciate the crucial importance of randomness and luck in strategic decision making

Enable students to recognize (and name) predictable decision traps in their own decisions and decisions of others

Improve the ability of students to make decisions themselves