Senior Executive Seminar Syllabus

Thursday, November 13

Introduction and Expression of Participant Objectives

Introduction to Strategic Decision Quality
How can you judge whether you are making a high-quality strategic decision given that the consequences of the decision will not be known for several years? Using a case study, we will explain the difference between strategic and operational decisions and the right level of quality for each type, and we will introduce the requirements for a quality decision.

Dialogue Decision Process
Many organizations use a decision-making process based on advocacy by project champions - and they fail. We present the more powerful collaborative dialogue decision process (DDP), in which decision-makers, decision support staff, and content experts come together to make the long-term strategic decisions that will shape the future of the organization.

Decision-Making Under Uncertainty
What is a good decision? We explain the fundamental but rarely applied concepts underlying any decision, including the critical difference between decisions and outcomes. You will experience some all-too-common fallacies of thought and decision-making through an interactive demonstration.

5:30 p.m.–7:00 p.m. Reception and Dinner
Hurdles to Organizational Innovation
Even the most creative individuals and teams cannot sustain innovation or bring it to market if their organization unknowingly puts up barriers. Professor Sutton is the coauthor of The Knowing-Doing Gap, Weird Ideas That Work, and the new Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Base Management. He will discuss his research on why organizations have trouble implementing innovation programs and ideas for promoting creative cultures.

Friday, November 14

7:30 a.m.–8:15 a.m. Continental Breakfast

8:15 a.m.–12:00 p.m.

Getting the Decision Frame Right
Framing is arguably the most important yet often neglected step in working on a strategic decision. When done properly, it sets the stage for the remaining steps toward a decision: identifying the purpose of the effort and the perspective that will be taken and setting the scope - what will be included and excluded from consideration.

Innovation and Business Strategy: Complementary or Opposing Forces
We discuss the role of innovation in development and execution of business strategy. We will talk about why innovation is such a hot topic right now and introduce a new model that recognizes and depends on the strengths of both innovators and implementers and that cycles among them for refinement of the most valuable ideas.

Behavioral Challenges in Decision-Making
As human beings, we are prone to error. We will introduce a framework for understanding how natural behavioral processes can produce biases, distortions, and mistakes in decision-making. We will demonstrate many of these phenomena firsthand through individual and class exercises Topics will include biases in perception, fallacies in reasoning, motivational biases, personality differences, and group dynamics. We will conclude with preventive measures and techniques that can help decision-makers avoid potential traps and pitfalls, improve individual decisions, and enrich group and organizational decisions.

Value-Focused Enterprise Risk Management
We provide an overview of value-focused enterprise risk management. We will discuss different categories of risk and key factors for successful ERM: building a shareholder value protection perspective, quantification of uncertainty, establishing a corporate risk tolerance, implementation of the ERM process, and risk management solutions, roles, and responsibilities.

12:00 p.m.–1:00 p.m. Lunch

1:00 p.m.–-3:30 p.m.

Managing Sociotechnical Risk
Professor Paté-Cornell will provide you with the perspectives needed to understand, prevent, and respond to major sociotechnical failures. She chairs the department of Management Science & Engineering at Stanford and is a world leader in research related to engineering risk analysis, risk management, decision analysis under uncertainty, and more generally the use of Bayesian probability to process incomplete information. Since 2001, she has been applying risk analytic methods to the study of different types of terrorist attacks on the United States, the assessment of intelligence information, and the effectiveness of countermeasures.

Decision Leadership and Governance Design
The essence of corporate governance is not compliance but making good decisions. "Decision rights" define who has the authority to decide on and take action without further approval. Four different perspectives - economic, organizational, legal, and audit - influence how leaders think about decision rights and how organizations make decisions. We will discuss these perspectives and introduce key principles for effective governance design.

Building Organizational Decision Competency
We discuss what it takes to build decision-making capabilities in an organization and how organizations can transform their decision-making into a core competency. We also provide some examples of organizations that are on this journey.

Seminar Leaders

David Fishman
Managing Director, Strategic Decisions Group
Mr. Fishman leads the Private Equity and Financial Services practice of SDG and is co-leader of the Power and Gas Utilities practice. He has conducted hundreds of consulting engagements with senior executives at both Fortune 500 and emerging growth companies. He has expertise in strategic management, business development, finance, operations, and organizational change across a range of industries. His involvement has led to successful strategies and investments as measured by the value created in the marketplace. Mr. Fishman is a frequent speaker at conferences and universities, including Stanford. He received an MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business and an MS in engineering-economic systems and a BA in economics from Stanford University.

Bruce Judd
Adjunct Professor, Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences, Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University, and Executive Director of Client Education, Strategic Decisions Group
Bruce Judd has more than 35 years of experience as a consultant and educator in decision analysis. He is currently Adjunct Professor, Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences, at Northwestern University, and he taught at Stanford for 14 years in the Graduate School of Business. Dr. Judd enriches his courses with relevant anecdotes from his many years of strategy consulting, and he adapts successful exercises from his 17 years of teaching at Stanford and Northwestern. Typical consulting assignments have included transforming the decision-making culture of a Fortune 50 company; developing strategies to revitalize telecommunications, medical devices, automotive, office products, and printing and publishing companies; evaluating capital investment decisions in the energy industry; determining foreign compliance with arms control treaties; and prioritizing scientific research. Dr. Judd holds a PhD and an MS in decision analysis from Stanford University.

M. Elisabeth Paté-Cornell
Burton J. & Anne M. McMurty Professor and Chair, Department of Management Science and Engineering (MS&E), Stanford University
Professor Paté-Cornell has been chair of MS&E at Stanford University since its creation in January 2000. Her research has focused on the extension of probabilistic risk analysis models to include organizational factors with application to a wide variety of problems such as the management of the tiles of the space shuttle, offshore platforms during oil and gas production, and anesthesia during surgery. She is currently working on mathematical models that allow management of programmatic risks for the development of safety-critical systems, for instance, in the space industry. Professor Paté-Cornell was recently elected to the French Académie des Technologies for her work in engineering risk analysis.

Carl S. Spetzler
Lecturer, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and CEO, Strategic Decisions Group
Specializing in strategy development, business innovation, and strategic change management, Dr. Spetzler has developed creative business strategies for major financial institutions, capital-intensive companies, high-technology manufacturers, and systems businesses. Over the past 20 years, he has been a leader in designing an innovative strategy development process that helps corporate leaders cope with the lack of explicit strategic alternatives, deal with the complexities of uncertainty and risk over long time horizons, and achieve lasting change. Dr. Spetzler works with top management and boards of directors to improve the quality of decisions. He has led numerous senior executive seminars on strategic decision and risk management topics. He serves on the boards of the Illinois Institute of Technology and the Decision Education Foundation. In 2004, Dr. Spetzler received the Ramsey Medal, the highest honor awarded by the Decision Analysis Society of INFORMS for lifetime contributions to the field.

Robert Sutton
Professor of Organizational Behavior (by courtesy) and Professor of Management Science and Engineering, School of Engineering, Stanford University
Robert Sutton is a founding member of Stanford's d-school. His research interests include the links and gaps between managerial knowledge and organizational action, innovation, the role of wisdom in organizational life, and group and organizational performance. He is the author of dozens of publications, including several books, business press articles, and research papers. Dr. Sutton holds a doctorate and masters from the University of Michigan and a BA from the University of California at Berkeley.