The Cuban Missile Crises: Strategic Decision-Making

1635 Words4 Pages

Topic: ‘If we think of organisations, and their surrounding environment, as being political systems, this changes the way in which we think about strategic decision-making. This is important as strategic decision-making lies at the very heart of strategy making. ‘

A business strategy is about decision-making through all the options available that will lead a business to a shiny direction and steps it will take to achieve its goals. Strategy decisions are always made under perfect rationality models while the reality life is more complicated and changes happen are unpredictable, thus information about current situation of an organisation needs to be updated frequently so that analyst can have a fast response on strategies (Clegg et al., 2011). The essay will have critical analysis reflected based on the movie Thirteen Days (Donaldson, 2000) about the decision making process and incredible outcomes for the Cuban Missile Crisis happened in 1962, on behalf of the strategy making part including the process to decide an appropriate strategy and factors need to be considered as well as reasons why they chose that negotiation as an optimised decision will be addressed and further discussion. Then the political strategic decision-making models from Allison and Zelikow (1999) will be discussed in the later part combined with Rational decision-making suggestions from Vermeulen and Curseu (2008), who classified an optimal outcome is made from utility theories that usually applied on a firm’s decision-making. Turns out that surrounding environment and political systems, as well as some other external factors, are directly related to the decision-making process, one can also figure out their priority goal by the strategic decision discovery. ...

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... systems and surrounding environment that all these external factors will affect the decision-maker’s mind and lead to a different on the final strategic decision-making.

References:

ALLISON, G. T. & ZELIKOW, P. 1999. Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, United States, Longman Inc.
ANDERSON, P. A. 1983. Decision making by objection and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Administrative Science Quarterly, 28, 201-222.
CLEGG, S., CARTER, C., KORNBERGER, M. & SCHWEITZER, J. 2011. Strategy: Theory and Practice, London, SAGE Publications Ltd.
Thirteen Days, 2000. Directed by DONALDSON, R. U.S.A.
VERMEULEN, P. A. M. & CURSEU, P. L. 2008. Entrepreneurial Strategic Decision-making: A Cognitive Perspective. United Kingdom: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.
ZBARACKI, M. J. & EISENHARDT, K. M. 1992. Strategic Decision Making. Strategic Management Journal, 13, 17-37.

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