Drucker on Decisions

Is this a generic situation or an exception?⊕ (Drucker 2008, chap. 17)

Drucker distinguishes between 4 different types of situations that loosely fall into “is this a generic situation or an exception”:

• The truly generic situation
• A situation that is special for this organization but common and generic in the industry
• A “truly exceptional” event that won’t re-occur⊕ Reminds me of a black swan event.
  
  
• The first example of a new type of event

⊕ (Drucker 2008, chap. 17)

Converting a decision into action requires answering several distinct questions: Who has to know of this decision? What action has to be taken? Who is to take it? And what does the action have to be so that the people who have to do it can do it?⊕ (Drucker 2008, chap. 17)

The effective person encourages opinions. But he insists that the people who voice them also think through what it is that the “experiment”—that is, the testing of the opinion against reality—would have to show. The effective person, therefore, asks, What do we have to know to test the validity of this hypothesis? What would the facts have to be to make this opinion tenable?⊕ (Drucker 2008, chap. 17)

They know that unless proven otherwise, the dissenter has to be assumed to be reasonably intelligent and reasonably fair-minded. Therefore, it has to be assumed that he has reached his so obviously wrong conclusion because he sees a different reality and is concerned with a different problem.⊕ (Drucker 2008, chap. 17)