SMALL THINGS MATTER We make many hundreds if not thousands of decisions every da

SMALL THINGS MATTER

We make many hundreds if not thousands of decisions every day, and the cumulative effect of those many small decisions is usually more influential than the effect of our larger decisions.

this is the central problem with running increasingly large organizations: providing a means of decidability for the many little decisions that people make every day.

In Good To Great, the author reduces this problem to having a ‘strategy’ that is very simple. It provides a method of decidability to everyone in the company so that many zillions of little decisions accumulate in the production of the organizations competitive strategy in the market.

Unfortunately, a disproportionate number of our decisions are made in theoretical rather than empirical context. In particular, those that require we influence others (customers and co workers). This influence requires local knowlege that is not really open to generalization.

One of the cool features of software is that if you organize your business process into workflows you can control a lot of those small decisions.

The opposite problem occurs when the local phenomenon (the interpersonal actions) more more significant in influencing a decision by peer, manager or customer than are the facts.

Why? because the marginal difference between suppliers (merchants) forces prices to neurality, leaving non-price matters the reason for decisions. Ergo, talent and customer service and knowledge of particular businesses tends to be more influential in business relations and product signaling value more influential in consumer relations.