1. Decision making and Procrastination
A lot has been written about the negative impacts of procrastination in business decision making. However procrastination can also be very useful in business decision making in various ways. Procrastination reduces uncertainty due the information that becomes available as time passes. There are times in business where it would be advantageous to postpone strategic decisions in business so that realization of random facts can be more concrete and the administration can have relevant and precise information on which to base their decision.
Procrastination also enables a business to take advantage of spontaneous opportunities. At time it is possible for business to differ decision about resource allocation until demand or constraints become clear. One company that has benefited form the procrastination strategy is Xilinx. Xilinx is a company a supplier of programmable logic devices with its head quarter based in San Jose, California. In 200-2001 the company adopted the procrastination strategy that aimed to reduce inventory investment and improve delivery performance (AME info.com). The postponement strategy achieved both of its objectives of lowering inventory cost and improving customer service level.
Procrastination has its own disadvantages in business decision making. A company can postpone decisions to “wait and see” whether a prevailing situation would improve only for the situation to worsen. For example a company may delay its decision to order supplies with the anticipation that prices will lower in the future only for the prices to go up. Procrastination may also lead to lost of opportunities in business. Failure to make prompt decision may pass on the opportunity that may arise that would have been easier to take advantage of the decision procrastinated had already been effected.
2. Innovation Based strategies versus Speed Based Strategies
Innovation based strategies are the driving force of most successful businesses today. A company must continue to innovate in order to deal with competition, increasing cost of doing business and a market that is increasingly becoming complex. The process of decision making in business that adopt innovation based strategies is sequential and based on hierarchical systems (Eurojournals Publishing, 2007). First an idea has to be identified or created and then strategies are formulated to put this idea into place. The next step is the implementation of the formulated strategies and then an evaluation of the study. Through out all this steps important business decisions have to be made from time to time. The decision making process under this strategy is process based and has long term impacts.
Factoring speed into business strategy is key element to improving competitiveness and marketability. Speed based strategies are meant to achieve immediate results within a business context. Decision are based on current need and the decision making process in much faster is it does not involve many steps as in innovation based strategies. Fast speed is factored into organization decisions and goals. The success of a particular product will be determined with the timing it is introduced to the market; if the product reaches the market earlier than competitors it will have great advantage. By placing speed at the heart of the business strategy, a company can make products at lower costs than its competition (Penton Media (2010). Speed forces you to produce products right the first time. Unnecessary, non value-added operations are reduced or eliminated outright, thereby reducing the opportunity for defects to occur.
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