Effective entrepreneurial decision-making
To make good decisions, entrepreneurs need a reliable process to steer them through difficult decision making in the early stages of their new, and therefore vulnerable, business.
Distilling a truth from competing evidence is a skill. Having the methodology to assess and understand different viewpoints to filter the good and the bad is something all successful entrepreneurs have – they would not be successful otherwise. It is the key, first to survival and then to success. For some, this skill is intuitive, but for the majority, it is a learnt skill and in an entrepreneurial team an agreed and trusted approach for making good business decisions is vital.
Only when a team has worked out a process that helps them to ask and answer the right questions about the way forward, do the differing ideas of each team member become an asset, because they have now learned both to evaluate and appreciate alternative positions for what they are. Once there is agreement about the problem, smart people can usually find the solution. If you can’t understand or agree on the problem or the way in which it is solved, you will run around in circles. You spend time, money and people resource working on the wrong things, solving the wrong problems.
Steve Jobs said that he never allowed a meeting to end where the senior team were not in total agreement about the big issues. Getting to that point needs a process, where you can collectively and objectively look at all the information without any bias, to find the facts.
Finding the process
Entrepreneurs, therefore, need a way of mentally managing the noise, chaos, competing information and opinions to navigate a way forward. Without that process and thinking skills, you limit your business potential and scalability, no matter how good your product or idea is.
Having appreciated the need for such a process, where might it be found and how can schools prepare future entrepreneurs to develop the skills they will need, in order to start their own businesses with a greater expectation of success?
WEF and future skills
An important clue can be found in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report for 2025, the latest in an important series of papers from the WEF that have looked at the skills that employers think are and will be important.