MIT Sloan Management Review

Mornings are way better for making important decisions — research into “decision fatigue” shows that impulsiveness and inertia take over after we’ve made too many choices in a day.

When 33 Chilean miners were rescued after being trapped underground for 69 days, the world cheered. Here’s what your company can learn from key leadership decisions made during the mine cave-in crisis.

Consumers were surprised in October 2009 by the first of a series of highly publicized recalls of Toyota vehicles in the United States. Citing a potential problem in which poorly placed or incorrect floor mats under the driver’s seat could lead to uncontrolled acceleration in a range of models, Toyota announced that it was recalling 3.8 million U.S. vehicles. The article discusses two root causes for Toyota’s quality problems.

Generating good innovation proposals from within the ranks of the organization is only the beginning. The more difficult part is creating a selection process that identifies which ideas to implement.

Almost all executives want more and faster information, and almost all companies are racing to provide it. What many of them overlook, though, is that the real aim should be not faster information but faster decision making — and those aren’t the same things.

Companies have been trained to think about data all wrong, say Attivio’s Ali Riaz and Sid Probstein. “Analytics don’t have to be based on super-precise data,” they say. “The report doesn’t have to be perfect. It needs to capture the behavior, not the totality of it.”

When companies use some sort “sustainability filter,” it helps make the concept real and find opportunities for efficiency says Roberta Bowman, senior vice president and chief sustainability officer for Duke Energy.

The increase in outsourcing and offshoring of complex work has resulted in innovation efforts that require coordination across cultural, geographic and legal boundaries. If that coordination is mishandled, companies can find themselves needing to make multimillion- or even billion-dollar changes. The complexity of the task makes midcourse corrections likely. Managers must anticipate and adapt their processes in order to reduce risk and, ultimately, cost.

In sales, the rapport between a prospective buyer and seller can be the deciding factor. Using analytics, Assurant Solutions has tripled its success. (A case-study interview.)

Over the past decade, a number of the world’s respected companies have collapsed. A factor was these companies’ approach to risk management. Two different views have evolved on how risk should be assessed. The first — the frequentist view — is based on historical data. The second, or Bayesian, considers risk to be in part a judgment of the observer. Many measures are being deployed to prevent future crises — a shift from frequentist to Bayesian risk management should be part of this effort.

Complex supply chains with many agents are more prone to problems, and on occasion, to spectacular collapse. Examples from the last few years include the subprime mortgage crisis; the failure of the Peanut Corporation of America; and dioxin-contaminated Irish pork. Without a doubt, today’s complex supply chains are vulnerable to opportunistic behavior leading to sometimes catastrophic failure. But there are five steps managers can take to protect their companies.

There has been enormous progress in embedding the use of analytics at lower levels of companies. But according to Thomas H. Davenport, professor at Babson College and one of the best-known thinkers about analytics and business intelligence, the upper levels of companies haven’t kept up.

Many managers think they’ve committed their organizations to evidence-based decision making — but have instead, without realizing it, committed to decision-based evidence making. Is that all bad? What can be done to fix it?

Companies are remarkably myopic when they go about forming strategic partnerships. Systematizing the analysis process should produce more gain and less pain.

The field of forecasting has advanced significantly in recent years. But managers need to learn from history about what they can and cannot predict, and develop plans that are sensitive to surprises.

How have strategies for supply chain design changed in recent years? What are the forces most profoundly shaping them now? What kinds of models have emerged for companies to consider, choose among or learn from?

In this pair of twinned interviews, MIT professor and entrepreneur David Simchi-Levi and MIT professor Charles Fine — two of the world’s leading thinkers on supply chain and value chain design — offer answers to those questions and others.

Accurate measurement of cost savings in the supply chain is easier said than done. But learning how to address the measurement and reporting challenges can make businesses more profitable and more competitive.

Social networks provide greater access to information, which improves people’s judgment and decision making, right? Not always, according to some recent research.

There’s no sense in denying it: interpreting weak signals into useful decision making takes time and focus. These three stages can help you see the periphery—and act on it—much more clearly.

Think product innovation is hard? Management innovation is even harder, according to Julian Birkinshaw of the London Business School.