Rules of Thumb in Business Decision-making: Heuristics-based Decision-making in Small and Medium Canadian Businesses

Business executives face the challenge of making every day better business decisions. They make those decisions using gut feel, common sense, intuition, experience, and, often without knowing it, various forms of heuristics or rules of thumb. Over the past 25 years, as a senior executive of several Canadian hi-tech businesses, I noticed that the decision-making process I have applied was often based on personal experience. This book explores the heuristics personal experience is based on. The research this book is built on confirms the use of heuristics in business decision-making, presents some common business heuristics, and proposes methods of making the application of heuristics more useful for better decision-making in various business situations. Two main conclusions resulting from this research are: executives apply extensively various forms of business heuristics when solving business problems, and the heuristics they use are both tacit and explicit. Finally the book suggests a set of what-how rules that can assist in converting tacit business heuristics into explicit ones by expanding their information content.