Your Most Important Decision
Learn about the author. Kelvin is the Founder of MontaRosa. He has spent the last 20 years in executive search, most recently managing the global private equity practice at another leading executive search firm. Read more from this authorExecutives make decisions every day. Dozens of them. Which, however, are the most important? Which should have received more attention and which should have received less or even been delegated?
Sometimes the answer is obvious: the consequences of where you locate your new factory are likely far greater than where you hold the holiday party. Instead, imagine you’re the CEO of a company about to bring a new smart phone to market. Do you put more of your attention to reviewing the feature set, the marketing plan, the distribution mix, or the pricing of the new device? It’s a bit harder, isn’t it?
Recently I had the chance to listen to Tom Davenport and Jeanne Harris, co-authors of Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results, and was intrigued to hear Harris say that when her firm, Accenture, asks client executives to list the ten most critical decisions in their firms, quite often they cannot. The question is met with a blank stare. On the one hand, that bafflement is a consultant’s dream; on the other, it’s quite frightening.
The two appeared on a webcast put on by the International Institute for Analytics to review research Davenport recently completed on how organizations make decisions. He found, for example, that The Stanley Works – a maker of tools and related items – had discovered that pricing decisions were critically important to its business. So much so that it created a Pricing Center of Excellence and has boosted gross margins by 7% or more and put $200M to the bottom line by improving the decision processes around pricing. The results of pricing decisions are even included in managers’ evaluations and compensation reviews.
At MontaRosa we’re in the leadership business and so I put this thinking to the challenges we help our clients meet. We’ve often seen our job as helping the client ask the right questions: How do you best define a given role in your organization? How do you optimize where that person sits, to whom they report, the resources they control, and the purview of their responsibility?
Davenport and Harris helped me put a new lens on this: The questions they inspired me to ask include:
- What are the most important decisions that the person in this role will need to make?
- Does the company think or does it know that these are the decisions that will have the most impact?
It’s a vital distinction. We can use this information to help shape the role and bring forward the best candidates. And then to ask:
- How can the chosen candidate best be positioned and supported to have success in making those decisions?
- Are there organizational overlaps or gaps that might diminish the person’s chances of success and what can we do to help remedy them?
- Are the governance structures in place to give this person the authority and freedom to operate in such a way that they can make and implement these decisions?
Frankly, I don’t think that any company should look at a single candidate until they can answer those questions – and no candidate should accept a position if they are unable to get those questions answered.
Kelvin
Leave a Reply 
MontaRosa is an innovative leadership company focusing our expertise on executive search, human capital management, leadership consulting and succession management planning.
Global in scope, we offer the capability to reach across all industries – but with an emphasis in private equity and financial services. Our clients are defined by their commitment to revolutionary change, exponential growth and green initiatives. 
