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ision to blockade Cuba. As a result, he opened extra channels of communication with Khrushchev to monitor the impact of the blockade on his thinking. This gave Kennedy more information about the Russian leader’s reactions and helped him come up with the idea of trading the missiles in Turkey for those in Cuba. conclUSion At the heart of our analysis is the premise that leaders can make good decisions. But to do so we need to broaden our understanding of what happens when we are confronted with the usual mix of unstructured and incomplete data, different perspectives, time pressures, and other sources of uncertainty. In many companies there is a tendency to treat strategic decisions as primarily rational processes of analysis. An organization faces a particular context defined in terms of competitors, customers, suppliers, regulators, and other stakeholders, and seeks ways to best position itself to meet its core objectives. For example, when Motorola looked out at its changing business landscape in the mobile phone business in the 1990s, it would have seen Nokia and Ericsson shifting from analog to digital technologies, would have looked internally to see that it had some of the key capabilities for digital in-house, and would have quickly moved to take advantage of these key capabilities to push into a strong position in digital mobile telephony. Certainly any business school student or strategy analyst worth his salt would have seen this strategy as the “obvious” business move at the time. The only problem with this standard analysis, however, is that it ignores arguably the single most important part of the picture – the decision makers! Decisions don’t just happen by themselves, and don’t take form in some random way. “Objective strategic analysis” is close to useless if the key decision makers are not part of that analysis. That’s why it is so important to bring the focus back to the key people in organizations that we call leaders. We all share some common attributes because of how our brains have evolved, and these attributes have much to do with how we think and act. There are a lot of good things that come with this, but also some potentially dangerous things as well, so if we don’t take it upon ourselves to be alert to these red flags and think again, we are vulnerable to making bad decisions that we need not make. Sydney Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and Director of the Tuck Executive Program. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on strategy and leadership, and has served as a consultant for companies around the globe. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Management, and the author of more than ten books, including the international best seller, Why Smart Executives Fail. He can be reached at +1 603 646 2864, or sydney.finkelstein@dartmouth.edu. h o s p i t a l i t y d es ign s ummit 2 0 0 9

Hospitality & Design Summit 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Hospitality & Design Summit 2009