How to Make a Right Decision | 4 Important Steps and Quotes

How to make a Right Decision

Right decision making is a great skill to master. But not everyone can muster the courage to take a bold decision first time and be confident about its success. What about you? Do you make a lot of right decisions every day? How do they turn out to be? Have you ever thought about the success of all your Right decision making?

If you are in your mid-career, you would know how important it is to make the right decision the first time. It can make or break a company. For example, an executive making a right decision to let go of a client without thinking through about the consequences. Now it turns out that the competitor of the company got the same client and that single client has generated double of what they earned in the last quarter. Now, what the executive would feel? Yes, terrible. But with a proven method you can turn around the consequences or better yet, you can make the right decision the first time.

In this article, we will show you what to think before making any right decisions. You will also learn how to divide your decisions into different categories and how to create a decision framework for your big-impact decisions.

Without much ado let’s get started.

Making Right Decision Quotes

The right decision making quotes are picking a choice among all the options which seem to be the right one for the individual, organization, country or for the world at large.

Now everyone makes a right decision in different ways. And how they make the decision? Primarily on the basis of what they know at any given moment of time! So, to improve one’s ability to choose the right option from a series of alternatives, one needs to know the things s/he should do.

What to think before making any right decision?

Before you know how to make a right decision, you need to know the elements which can support your decision in every sphere of your life, especially your career. There are certain things. If you do these things right, the chances of making a right decision the first time would be much easier.

#1. Limitations/Constraints

You will not be able to know everything about everything. When a career decision has to be made, your time would be limited and you would only get few days to few weeks to make a right decision in your career. So what would you do then? You need to know your limitations. Thus it’s always better if you can set a series of constraints and decide on the basis of that. For example, if you want to choose between which alternative to choose in your MBA specialization, set constraints of time, institution, money and placement. Suppose, you set a time of 15 days to decide what specialization you should choose. And you also choose the institutions (suppose the best 20 and no more). You also choose how much money you would spend to hire a career counselor to help you with your right decision making. Lastly, you will check the placements provided by the institutions (in different specializations) only in India. Now you can see that within the purview of these constraints, you need to make a right decision. Once you limit your area of thinking, you would be able to improve your right decision away.

#2. Opportunity cost

This is a big one and most people don’t think about it. Suppose you are a manager of a product company. You’re about to launch a product. How would you decide whether to go for a market testing before you launch a product? How would you know whether to go ahead with it or not? Here’s a simple thing you need to understand and that is the concept of opportunity cost. If you do invest a lump sum amount of money, what may or may not happen? Suppose, you see that due to the market testing your product launch becomes extra-ordinarily successful. Or else, may be the market testing is not successful at all. We will not go with success. Let’s see what happens when we pick the worst scenario. If you imagine that market testing is a failure, what else you can do with the money if you don’t invest it? You may use it to improve the product features. You may invest in improving your value chain or hire a vendor who will provide you great value. So, if you choose to go for market testing, your opportunity cost would be equal to the cost of failure plus what you could do if you would have not invested the money in market testing. Think about it. If you can get this right decision, you will make the right decision always.

#3. Impact

Now all right decisions are not as impactful as few are. For example, if you hire a person and he leaves within 10 days, there will be a loss for a company. But if you compare it with the strategic failure of the company the impact is much lesser on the company. So, in the beginning of making the right decision, always make sure that how impactful a wrong decision may have to be? No, there’s no point of becoming risk averse. But you need to understand the impact beforehand. If you need to take the help of an experienced professional. The final right decision has to be made by you.

These are three things you need to take care of before you make any right decision. And if you do these three things, before making the right decision, no matter for which area (career or business) you are making the decision, you will be right the first time. No, there is no guarantee that you will make the right decision. But you will closer toward perfection.

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Types of Right Decisions

Right Decisions can be of many types. We will categorize decisions so that you can understand where you can make a right decision.

• Long term/Short Term

There are decisions which are made now but have long-term effect and few do have short-term effect. So, if you’re currently making the right decision and if it has long-term effect on your career, think twice as much as you would do in case of a decision having short-term effect. For example, if you think you’re smarter than your employer and decide to show him, think before doing this. Because it may have a long-term impact on your career. That’s why author Robert Greene mentioned in his book “The 48 Laws of Power” – “Never outshine the master.”

• People/Money

This is incredibly hard choices. First, let’s talk about right decisions about people. If a company wants to thrive, it has to make certain decisions about its people. But this is a delicate situation as people are the cornerstone of the organization. If you keep or let go of any employee it will affect the existing people in the company as well. If you’re taking any right decision about money; either you will gain a huge profit if you make this decision or lose a huge sum. In certain cases, the decision in regards to people would be more critical than decisions about money and in some cases the other way around. So, before you make a right decision, label it as one – either people or money. Ask questions like – “Who would get more affected if this decision becomes wrong?” or “What would we risk here by making the right decision?” If you know which is making the right decision, it would be easier for you to make your mind according to given circumstances in the company and in the industry.

• Contraction/Expansion

Few right decisions are made for expanding the company and few decisions are made to contact the company. Now, you need to decide which types of decisions are you making? Is it a decision to step back or is it a decision to grow ahead? Accordingly, you will set up your right decision making constraints and take a final call.

These are the basic types of right decision you make in your career and business on the everyday basis. As you go on expanding your business and career, you would face many decisions like negotiating a deal, increasing the overall investment in training and development, stop production of certain products. But if you see the above types each of the right decision you will make will ultimately fall into these six categories – Long term, short term, people, money, contraction and expansion. Understand them well and you will make a right decision the first time.

Framework for making big-impactful decisions

There is no all-size-fits formula for every decision. No. But there is something that you can use. We will discuss about a framework which will help you make a right decision, especially in cases where the impacts are biggest for the company and career.

Let’s look at the framework. We will call it – “Yes/No Framework.”

In this framework, until you get all yes to all the stages of the framework you should not go ahead with the decision. Now, you can tweak the framework as per your need. But if you follow the same framework, you will get reasonable benefit in much shorter time.

1. Step-1: Start with the end in mind

What exactly you’re looking for? Why are you compelled to make a right decision? There should be an outcome which you’re visualizing right now. What is it? Write that outcome down on the paper right away. Now ask yourself – “If I make a right decision, will it provide me this outcome at the end (provided all things work as per plan)?” If your answer is yes, go ahead and go to the next step. If your answer is no, spend some more time on clarifying the outcome.

2. Step-2: What needs to happen before the outcome?

If you said yes to the question in the previous step, you will ask yourself this question – “What need/s to happen before the outcome?” For example, if your outcome is to increase sales for the next quarter, here what need to happen before outcome –

• You need to improve your strategic position in the market
• You need to recruit sales superstars or train the existing sales professionals
• You need to spot weaknesses in the process/structure to get more converts

Now once you write down these things, ask yourself – “If these things happen would the desired outcome would be achieved?” If the answer is yes, go to the next step and if the answer is no, spend some more time on the things which need to happen before the outcome.

3. Step-3: People matter

Now as you decide upon the steps prior to the outcome, it’s time to allocate resources. You need to choose people who can do these things (things prior to the outcome) and ask yourself – “Can whoever I allocated the resources to can deliver the outcomes?” These people are generally in top positions or senior level positions of the company. If the answer is yes, go to the final step and if the answer is no, pick better people till you are satisfied.

4. Step-4: Make a right decision

This is a framework which is bottom-up. We started with the end result and then we come to the top which will be making the right decision. For example, let’s say the decision is to launch a new product in the market. The desired outcome is to increase sales in the next quarter. The things you need to do prior to outcome are to improve your strategic position, recruit/train your salespeople and work on the weaknesses that act as hindrances in generating better revenues. Once it’s clear what needs to be done, it’s time to allocate people with the resources. Once everything is done, finally make a right decision.

Now often while making the right decision, people get confused about all the other options they can take. Draw a framework for each option and see which one you feel most confident about. Ask yourself – “If I make this decision, will it give me better results than the other alternatives?” If the answer is, you can go ahead and make a right decision.

In the final analysis, to make a right decision is not always easy. It’s a very complex process, especially there where your business or career is involved. But if you use the above framework and the information we have shared here, right decision making would become much easier for you and you would definitely get toward making that almost perfect decision the first time.

Related Articles

This has been a guide how to make a Right Decision. Here we are discuss the 4 important steps of right decision along with Quotes. You may also read its types of right decision-

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2. How to Make the Right Sales Hiring Decision Process
3. Some Important Points For Successful Career Decisions