, to make them. Congress passes laws, but any observer of national politics will be aware that the President sets the national agenda. Likewise, boards of directors are, notoriously, almost always mere instruments in the hands of corporate chief executives.
The very daily work of these people consists almost entirely of making decisions often "on the fly," with no time for an extensive planning process. CEOs have been found to be often supervising up to fifty different projects at one time, each of which required executive decisions (Mintzberg, 1990: 171). Setting directions is not the same thing as "planning" (Kolter, 1990: 104). The planning process, for these executive decision makers, did not take place in two week retreats, but was implicit in their decision actions (Mintzberg, 1990: 164 65).
In the work of successful executives, especially, a fluid quality is observed. In the world of business, a great many "rules," aphorisms, slogans, and other handy guides to decision making have evolved over the years (Pelton, Sackman, and Boguslaw, 1990: 14ff). Pop futurism of the "megatrends" sort presents neatly encapsulated pictures of the shape of things to come. Some of these doctrines, rules, and theories proclaim common sense, or seem to. Others survive on a sheer mom and apple pie appeal to popular values. All are presented as surefire guides to decision makers. Yet successful decision makers seem to ignore them, and even ignore more sophisticated guides to decision making. The underlying reason seems to be that the most critical decisions are precisely the ones for which the least reliable information or rules are available.
The theory of decision making begins by asking a fundamental question. What is a decision? One answer is that a decision contains the elements of judgement plus choice (Yates, 1990: 3). Suppose that I look out the window and make a judgement about what the weather is likely to be ...