Business judgment

Provide a broad commercial base...leverage research across diverse business lines. Pick your problems with great care and judgment. Be patient don t evaluate results after one year, but wait as long as five or six. Know when to quit a problem done largely by intuition, but we prefer to call it intelligence. 

There is not a great deal that can be done to acquire business savvy in the short-term there are very few shortcuts to experience and judgment. Even if a mentor has not yet acquired vast amoimts of it, it is nevertheless possible to be a skilled mentor whilst in the process of expanding his or her own business acumen. This can be done because ... 

Therefore we increasingly take the view that rather than fully simulating the business context, which may seem like a black box approach, it is better to have decision makers interact with more selective simulations. These help develop their intuitions and hone their judgment and reasoning ability in focused areas, especially in the area of probability, applied statistics, and decision theory, which is nonintuitive without such practice. 

Excessive involvement in activities that are pleasurable but have a high risk for serious consequences (buying sprees, sexual indiscretions, poor judgment in business ventures)... 

Decision analysis provides a formal theory for choosing among alternatives whose consequences are uncertain. The key idea in decision analysis is the use of judgmental probability as a general way to quantify uncertainty. Decision analysis has been widely taught and practiced in the business community for more than a decade (2 -4). It provides a natural way to extend cost-benefit analysis to include uncertainty. 

UPS did not stop with its synchronized commerce initiative, which, in my judgment, was more revolutionary then evolutionary. Chairman Eskew also codified and explained to UPS employees and to Wall Street, UPS s new organic growth strategy. And Eskew named this strategy the Four Quadrant model based on the University of North Carolina basketball team s use of the four-quadrant offense. As he stated, We will call our offense for innovation The Four Quadrants which focuses on innovating existing business operations internally and externally and, likewise, focuses innovation on new entrepreneurial ventures both internally and externally. ... 

Standard setting traditionally has been a function of professional and engineering societies and insurance companies which are in the business of making judgments on the risk being contemplated. Among these groups are ... 

However, if chemicals are irredeemably cyclical, does that make commodity chemicals an unattractive business In our view, the key is to look beyond individual cycles, at the long-term profitability of the sector. This reveals a perhaps surprising judgment, in view of conventional wisdom about the sector s unattractiveness commodity chemicals have earned returns above their weighted average cost of capital (WACC) across a number of cycles, making it very different and a much better performer than most other commodity sectors. 

Based on the preceding discussion, it should be obvious that determining the value of a business is not an exact science. While a number of established techniques may be used, each business is unique. In fact, the value of a business ultimately is determined through negotiation between the buyer and the seller (Jackson, 2002). The agreed-on price usually will lie somewhere between the initial price of the seller and the initial offer of the buyer. The valuation of a business is based on the assessment of facts about the business, informed judgment, and some common sense (Jackson, 2002). 

The title of this section may be surprising at first. The process of science, one may think, produces clear-cut answers, and scientists pride themselves on the objectivity inherent in their disciplines and, accordingly, on conducting business in an objective manner. Clinical science, clinical research, and clinical practice, however, require a combination of objective information and informed judgment. Since all judgment is subjective, subjectivity is an integral part of clinical science, clinical research, and clinical practice. 

In the final investment phase a judgment is made on whether to put more money in R D, enter a joint venture or license a technology from outside in order to meet business objectives, basing the decision on a prior assessment of the company s knowledge gaps. If the company successfully obtains a needed technology or secures an appropriate patent, the intellectual asset is incorporated into the portfolio and the process repeats itself. 

---