There is a clear difference between making decisions and taking decision and making them work. Take for example the following scenario, you buy a particular company’s stock in order to invest in that business. You have made that decision. Once you have committed to the investment, your options are only two-fold, you can either buy or sell. You cannot in any way influence over the success of that organization.

On the other hand, instead of investing your money in a stock, you could invest it by starting your own business. Naturally, doing so entails strategic decision making, knowing your customer, identifying a target group, and creating a product for it. The success or the lack of it, is essentially in your hands. The success of your organization will depend on your business decision making skills. You have to make your decisions work for you.

Once you start examining and minutely scrutinizing the decision making tree which the average Joe takes, there appears to be different approaches to a common problem. Although inherently, there is nothing wrong with that, but it only goes to show that there is always scope for further tweaking our approach to extract maximum mileage.

Take for example, the question of a talented individual and the regular Joe working in an organization, doing the same routines and the same tasks. You would naturally expect this naturally gifted individual outperform the regular Joe, after all, he is exceptionally talented. Fact of the matter is that, the difference in output by both individuals, is not much. Question is, as a business entity what are we doing in order to make our HR policy work? What systems are in place to ensure that the exceptional individuals that we hire, are put to use in an exceptionally effective manner? Or as Warren Buffet puts it, what is the performance benefit when a talented individual is tasked to work in a distinctly average business concern? The answer, as you have guessed it, is pretty obvious.

On the other hand, when it comes to product strategy, we tend to lean on the other extreme. Whenever an organization’s services or products suffer, more initiatives and men are poured into it, so as to solve the problem. If a product line is going south, efforts are redoubled to ensure increase its sales, in order to secure market share. Selling strategies are cooked up and the marketing budget increased … all so that the problem is effectively solved. Our energies are directed towards making our decisions work. But the root question does not come to mind, given the scenario, whether we still want to be selling products in this market? Whether we still want to be in this business?

Biases are naturally occurring events. It happens to everybody. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out why we tend to focus on recruiting instead of focusing on the organization’s requirements and needs. Focusing on shiny talented individuals is way more appealing than focusing on tedious matters of rethinking the business’s marketing strategy.

Psychologically, product strategy comes to us more naturally too: it is much easier to proactively defend the product by pushing sales vide brilliant marketing strategies. On the other hand it is distinctly less appealing to entertain the possibility that the market does not give a damn any more about our product.

Given the economic scenario, as far as making decisions are concerned, it is high time that we step back a little and review our decision making process. As for product strategies are concerned we need to make some tough decisions and ensure that they in fact work.


References:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alastairdryburgh/2015/03/15/memo-to-the-ceo-are-we-making-decisions-or-making-decisions-work/

There needs to be a common goal, a strategic vision and a road map that details a series of small steps towards that goal. In order to even take a small, entities which make up an organization need to work together and synchronize. Employee’s cooperation and collaboration are for an organization’s success.
 
The concept of collaboration has now evolved to the next rung – social collaboration. Just as in its earlier definition, every employee, every team, every department, of an organisation works towards one common goal, but with a catch. The beauty of social collaboration is that this goal need not be pre-defined.
 
By combining and putting our heads together towards one common purpose, idea generation, can be optimized, brainstorming sessions can be better streamlined.  This is not rehashing the concept of team work, this is certainly not old wine in a new bottle. Sure this essentially teamwork, but with a key difference. It harnesses key technological innovations, and puts them to their optimal use and doing so has made all the difference.
 
Social communication need not be a waste of organizational resources. Technological innovations are the harbingers of collaboration that bridge continents and time zones. They provide a platform for the incubation of ideas generated after a brainstorming sessions by individuals across multiple continents. Social collaboration can be the key for that incubated idea which breaks new grounds and is recognized for its genius.
 
Social collaboration not only exploits the advantages of brain storming sessions but it also acts as a platform for greater innovation: the ideas discussed by in a social network across different countries lead to better ideas which significantly contribute to better innovations which lead to better products and customer satisfaction, which in turns leads to a larger number of customers, customer loyalty, etc.
 
The net result ultimately is higher turnovers, better revenues and profits for the organization. This in turn can be ploughed back into more and better research and development which can not only significantly impact the growth of the company but for the good of society as well. And it all started with social collaboration.
 
Social collaboration is a modern platform which when nurtured can enable growth. It has the potential to be the Holy Grail for an enterprise. What is required is strategic vision, and non-interference from the management. Although is easier said than done, but it is more and more visible in startups than in older, more established companies.
 
Modern startups have:
 
1.     The advantage of not having hierarchical structures which block vertical communication.
 
2.     Information flows freely across horizontal and vertical and is not segmented and isolated.
 
3.     People who actively and positively contribute to the discussion come into focus as opposed to people who are in a particular position in the organization.
 
4.     The advantage of being tech savvy and they exploit and harness advances in IT to their advantage.
 
5.     A focus on internal communication and do not solely depend on their marketing department which tends to focus more on clients for idea generation instead of internalizing the process.
 
6.     A strategic vision which enables their HR department to focus on long term objectives instead of short term ones. For example, although paying salaries immediately is important, but what is more critical is to ensure that people can be continued to be paid their salaries, three years down the line.

SAP’s President of Cloud and On-Premise HR says:

As per Ettling, the benefits of social collaboration easily outweighs its negative overtones. Leveraging business  networks is the glue that bind content, people and data, it simplifies work and drives towards sharing of knowledge to a common pool of experience which is a key proponent of growth and innovation.

References:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2015/03/13/is-social-collaboration-the-holy-grail-for-business-growth/
http://www.successfactors.com/en_us.html
http://www.sap.com/pc/tech/cloud/software/business-networks/index.html