"Sun Tzu's Art of War, Plotting and Attacking" also pointed out: "Know yourself and know yourself, and you will never be defeated; Know yourself and yourself, one wins and one loses; If you don't know each other and your friends don't know each other, every battle will be dangerous. " The "knowledge" in Sun Tzu's Art of War boils down to collecting information and "using it in five things", which refers to five aspects: Tao, heaven, earth, generals and law. "The nuclear program is divided into seven parts", which means "Who is the master? Who can? What is land? What is the law? Who is stronger? Skilled foot soldiers? Clear rewards and punishments? I know the result. "
In a sense, whether a decision-maker can make a correct decision depends on the amount of information he has. What information should decision makers have? There are two main aspects of information: task information and background information. Although these two kinds of information are related to decision-making, decision-makers still need to know what information they are looking for and what information they have obtained.
Task information refers to the information that people need to master in order to complete their work. In this respect, the definition of this information by senior leaders will be very different from that of ordinary employees. For example, leaders pay more attention to the information of strategic partners and strategic competitors than ordinary employees. There are three main forms of task information: the first is basic information about the job, such as task description and any related background information; The second is feedback information, which must be delivered to users in a timely and accurate manner in an easy-to-use way; The third is information related to improving skills and knowledge used in work, including training materials.
Background information is the information that individuals need to master in order to judge whether their tasks and decisions are consistent with the external environment. The background information includes the enterprise purpose, relevant industry information, the contents of the meeting between directors and managers to discuss the company strategy, and so on. This kind of information plays an extremely important role in ensuring that people look at their work from a global perspective. Without background information, the decisions made by decision makers will be divorced from reality and become castles in the air. Ford's new factory in Bridgeside is a good example. As one of the measures to end the long-term confrontation between management and trade unions, the company reached an agreement with trade unions to disclose all business information to employees. An interviewed trade union representative commented on this move: the manager of the factory near the bridge and the trade union have the same goal, which is to make the enterprise prosper day by day.
Today's society is an information society, and it is all kinds of information that makes human beings more civilized and rich. However, the fast-changing times also make the environment around us more complicated, and uncertain information often makes decision makers face a dilemma, even a difficult situation.
In addition, information, matter and energy are regarded as one of the three major contemporary resources. Like the other two resources, its acquisition comes at a cost, that is, it has a cost. If the increased income obtained by using information can't make up for its cost, then the use of information is worthless.
In the above two aspects, whether a large number of invalid information leads to the difficulty of leadership decision-making or the increase of direct cost of obtaining information, it has caused the increase of organizational decision-making cost. At present, many organizations have invested a lot of money in information transformation of enterprises in order to provide managers with more and more comprehensive information. As a result, leaders are overwhelmed by a lot of useless information, which greatly increases the decision-making cost.
Therefore, decision makers should analyze the relationship between information and its acquisition cost, and explain how to use information effectively in the decision-making process by discussing the expected value of information. We might as well boldly imagine that if we can simplify a lot of informatization, simplify a report more than a foot high into pieces of information, and even let the leaders of organizations read cartoons or organize "comic books" to make decisions, wouldn't the maximum benefit of information and the highest efficiency of decision-making come out?
For most decision-making, the total amount of information needed to completely eliminate its uncertainty and obtain a definite action plan may be infinite. However, as mentioned above, information, as a resource, needs a certain cost to obtain. So, is it necessary to get all the information when making a decision?
With the increase of information, the uncertainty in decision-making decreases, but the cost of obtaining information is gradually increasing, and the benefits brought by new information are decreasing. When it exceeds a certain amount (optimal point), the acquisition of new information will have a negative impact on the overall benefit. In the initial stage, it is relatively easy for decision makers to find useful information, and with the increase of information, the benefits brought by information also increase greatly. However, with the increase of information, it will become more and more difficult to find new useful information, so the cost of obtaining information is getting higher and higher, and the resulting income growth rate tends to be flat. When the cost of obtaining information is equal to the benefits it brings, if further information is obtained at this time, although the uncertainty and risk in decision-making can be reduced, for the decision-makers who aim at obtaining the maximum economic benefits, the acquisition of new information can only bring negative economic benefits, so it is no longer necessary to obtain it. It can be seen that there is an optimum in the process of obtaining information continuously. At this time, the amount of information can best balance the relationship between information acquisition cost and decision uncertainty, so as to maximize economic benefits. In a decision-making process, the decision-maker should get as close as possible to this optimal point and get as much valuable information as possible.