Abstract

How do executive teams make rapid decisions in the high-velocity microcomputer industry? This inductive study of eight microcomputer firms led to propositions exploring that question. Fast decision makers use more, not less, information than do slow decision makers. The former also develop more, not fewer, alternatives, and use a two-tiered advice process. Conflict resolution and integration among strategic decisions and tactical plans are also critical to the pace of decision making. Finally, fast decisions based on this pattern of behaviors lead to superior performance.

Editors' introduction

This illustrative paper contributed, for the time (1989), some new and surprising findings on the practice of strategic decision making. It is also selected because of its systematic use of an inductive case study methodology to generate a number of propositions about conditions, characteristics and drivers of fast strategic decisions. The paper is illustrating good research practice in its whole design, with its use of multiple case analyses to make inferences, its use of empirical accounts as illustrations and evidence of the propositions presented, its way of making use of theory to deepen the propositions, and its explicit connection to strategic outcome.

The findings presented in the paper are interesting because they are in total contrast to the perspectives on rapid strategic decision making then current. This paper concludes that fast decision makers use more, not less, information; they develop more, not fewer, alternatives. Furthermore, integration among strategic decisions and with tactical plans speeds, not slows, decision making.