Entrepreneurs and Strategic Decisions

Cognition involves individual decision making involving the selection of specific course of action that is supposed to bring a certain result. Decision making implies choice.

Environment of entrepreneurs is uniquely challenging and strategic decision includes complexity, uncertainty, rationality and control.

Strategic decisions typically share the same process:

1. Recognizing a problem situation: know problem very well, understand it
2. Generating alternatives, different solutions to problem situation
3. Evaluating the various alternatives
4. Selecting the alternative that best satisfies our evaluating criteria

Decisions of entrepreneurs differ from company managers as entrepreneurs:

1. Operate with limited information
2. Must be action oriented and decisive
3. Accept risk (don’t wait too long to take action, you don’t have infinite time for analysis)
4. Involve major consequences: be ready to face the consequences – be it bad or good

This blog post is based on my learnings from the course on ‘entrepreneurship’ offered by Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute, University of Maryland through Coursera (2014).