About making strategic entrepreneurial decisions

Company stuff, Decisions, Learning

As an entrepreneur you need to make a lot of strategic decisions and they all share these characteristics:

  1. They need to be decided in a limited amount of time (means fast) and very often under a stress
  2. You don’t know for sure what will be the final outcome as an impact of your strategic decision
  3. These are high-stake and high-risk decisions
  4. These decisions cause a significant allocation of resources (time, money, people, knowledge, …)
  5. You have a lot of different paths to choose but you need to choose the right one (with a limited amount of information)
  6. This is often uncharted territory where you can not use your own experience or knowledge (because it is in unknown domain)
  7. You usually prefer status quo terrain where you feel save rather then uncharted territory
  8. Impact of these decisions will have high impact on your company (your company can flourish or be terminated)

As an entrepreneurship you need to feel making strategic decisions is your home territory. And, yes, you will make mistakes, but this is good, because you will learn along this way.

I am a big fan of Maurits Cornelis Escher illustrations and I choose one that perfectly illustrates the strategic decisions. You can read more about this artist here.

So the question is:

Where this man is headed to?

M. C. Escher

M. C. Escher

Yes, he is going up, but from the different point of view he can go also down (if you look the whole picture bellow). The fact is that when looking only this part of the picture you have limited information and you make the decision like you do. Obvious information can also deceive us to see the broader picture.

M. C. Escher

M. C. Escher