Revenant (9/7/2011)
cfradenburg (9/7/2011)
majorbloodnock (9/7/2011)
What is less believable is the automation of contract negotiation; the question of "do I want to do business with this company?" can hinge on all sorts of intangible and subjective criteria which are unmeasurable even if a person can instinctively weight them up in the mix.But what percentage of the time is the wrong decision made based on those subjective criteria?
About forty percent. Several comprehensive (and expensive) studies agree that if you cannot reduce a decision to a few simple numbers on a spreadsheet and you weigh in subjective criteria, managers get about 60 percent decisions right, no matter how many consulting bucks and effort go into that decision.
That's 10 percent better than to flip a coin.
That's greatly reassuring to me. Both the fact that most decisions are right and the fact that pouring money into consultants doesn't help much. I still wonder how many decisions have the "wrong" decision made for a subjective reason when it could be reduced to numbers. I'm not saying that subjective reasoning doesn't still have it's place. After all, it's worth taking a risk on someone because you want them to succeed even though the numbers don't bear it out. Or not working with someone because you know they'll be a pain.