“If everyone in our company made ordinary business decisions in a commonsense way, we would be unstoppable.”

—T.J. Rodgers, “No Excuses Management”

In today's highly competitive market, a significant number of line managers, directors and first-level leaders have neither the time nor the luxury to take two years (or more) off to augment their educational base with an MBA or other advanced degree. Yet, the intellectual demands on management (at all levels) are greater than ever. Moreover, corporations feel a greater need to develop their managers in ways that focus on enhancing decision making ability and critical thinking so they can make better business decisions, day-in and day-out. To address this need, Olin Business School offers the Critical Thinking and Decision Making platform.

The primary goals of Critical Thinking and Decision Making are:

• Improve analytic reasoning skills, including the ability to use graphical and other representations of information for decision making purposes
• Enhance the ability to understand relationships among variables to improve decision making
• Increase participants' ability to comprehend new situations and adapt to new tasks
• Develop an understanding of the typical biases and decision traps that people fall into when they try to interpret information, and provide tools to overcome these biases and decision traps
• Develop an approach for framing problems appropriately in order to make effective decisions

Olin senior faculty frame each segment of this platform around the goal of making better business decisions on the basis of interpreting information (of either numerical, statistical or graphical form), avoiding common decision making pitfalls, and improved critical reasoning skills. We develop and discuss key concepts using short cases and practical examples. Participants are exposed to various concepts, techniques and frameworks through a series of exercises (both group and individual) to hone the skills that are taught throughout the day.

Critical Thinking and Decision Making