5. Preventing Corporate Fiascos: Understanding Corporate Decisions

This chapter is on the decision domain in the conceptual model and is inspired by Albert Camus’s statement that “Life is a collection of choices” and Antonio Damasio’s statement that most human decisions are emotion-driven. Although we are interested in all decisions, we pay more attention to the second: (1) rational decisions via decision analysis and modern quantitative methods in decision science; (2) irrational decisions as investigated in decision neuroscience and decision neuroeconomics. We attempt to understand corporate decisions from the decision makers' perspective, their view of the world. We explore the use of George Kelly’s personal construct theory (PCT) and his repertory grid (RG) technique for the understanding and measuring the criticality of decisions made by the responsible parties.