DEPARTMENT OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

Report on:
Article Summary
Submitted to:
Mam Anum Zulfiqar
Submitted by:
Asad Mahmood

(MBLE-13-18)

Imran Muhi U Din (MBle-13-29)

Naveed Nazar

(mble-13-05)

Riaz Hussain

(mble-13-14)

Shahid ul Haq

(mble-13-06)

Adeel khan

(mble-13-39)

Imran knah

(mble-13-23)

Class;
Mba 5th eve

BZu bahadur sub campus Layyah

Muhammad Adeel Khan

MBLE-13-39
Summary

Making good decisions and making them quickly is a differentiator of high-performing

companies. Article name ' Who has the D? How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational
Performance by Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko published by the Harvard Business
Review. Experience has repeatedly shown us that corporations that have strategy execution
problems tend to have mirky decision-making processes. High performing companies make good
decisions and make them happen quickly.
Rogers and Blenko provide the following Decision Diagnostic which is worth taking because it
will provide you with a snap shot of how effective the decision-making process is in your
organization:

Consider the last 3 meaningful decisions you've been involved in and ask yourself the following
questions:
1. Were the decisions right?
2. Were they made with appropriate speed?
3. Were they executed well?
4. Were the right people involved, in the right way?
5. Was it clear for each decision:
- Who would recommend a solution?
- Who would provide input?
- Who had the final say?
- Who would be responsible for follow-through?
6. Were the decision roles, process, and time frame respected?
7. Were the decisions based on appropriate facts?

8. To the extent that there were divergent facts or opinions, was it clear who had the D?
9. Were the decision makers at the appropriate level in the company?
10. Does the organization's measures and incentives encourage the people involved to make
the right decisions?
We are all called upon to make decisions everyday in our respective roles. Our successes,
failures, opportunities won or lost are a function of the decisions that we made or that we failed
to make. The next time you are given the opportunity to work on a crucial project or are in a
position to influence the direction that the company takes in a particular area, glance over at the
Diagnostic and ask you the 10 questions. They may well save you alot of time and money in the
long run.
If I am a leader than one of the key lessons I've learned as a leader is to clarify a key question
before the end of a meeting:
Who has the D?
The "D" in this case refers to the Decision Maker in a RAPID framework.
RAPID is defined as follows:

Recommend

Approve

Perform

Input

Decide

In every process or decision, you need to know what role you and other members of your team
play means are you there to recommend a solution? Are you there to propose alternatives?
Perform actions? These are roles that need to make decision. According to my perception the
most important of these is the D. What is the decision you need to make? And who can make the
decision?

If no one, or alternatively, everyone, is a decision maker, you have a problem.

For an example of the effects of lack of clarify in decision-making, look to Washington DC.
While the US government demonstrates the brilliance of the Founding Fathers in balancing
power, it's a disaster as a model for efficiency and running a business.
Make sure that by the end of every meeting you've clarified who is the D. This will enable you
and your teams to move forward. Here are some examples of where you can speed decisionmaking by clarifying the D:

In local markets, who has makes the decision to change prices or create promotions?
Within what guardrails?

In prioritizing features, who has the decision-rights to cut a feature in order to hit a key
milestone?

In hiring a new employee, who makes the decision to hire? Who makes the decision to
fire? Do you have a "bar raiser" in your process who has the ability to block a hire?

There are hundreds of small and large decisions made by a business every day.
As your team grows, many decisions will be good ones, but many will be wrong. But if you don't
know who made them, or who is empowered, decisions won't happen.

Imran Muhi U Din

MBLE-13-29
Summary

A goal and clear decision making is very compulsory for successes of every organization.
Indeed, making good decisions and making them happen quickly are the hallmarks of highperforming organizations. At many companies, decisions routinely get stuck inside the
organization like loose change. But its more than loose change thats at stake, of course; its the
performance of the entire organization. Never mind what industry youre in how big and well
known your company may be, or how clever your strategy is. If you can not make the right
decisions quickly and effectively, and execute those decisions consistently, your business will
lose ground. In the organization performance if face the bottleneck then the manager makes the
many suggestion and plan to solve out the bottleneck from the process. Bottleneck should be in
the every department so good manager handle efficiently to more productivity.
Every major company today operates in global markets, buying raw materials in one place
shipping them somewhere else, and selling finished products all over the world. Most are trying
simultaneously to build local presence and expertise, and to achieve economies of scale.
Decision making in this environment is far from straightforward. Good decision making depends
on assigning clear and septic roles. This sounds simple enough, but many companies struggle to
make decisions because lots of people feel accountable or no one does. RAPID and other tools
used to analyze decision making give senior management teams a method for assigning roles and
involving the relevant people. The key is to be clear who has input, who gets to decide, and who
gets it done.
The Five letters in RAPID correspond to the Five critical decision-making roles: recommend,
agree, perform, input, and decide. As youll see, the roles are not carried out lock step in this
orderwe took some liberties for the sake of creating a useful. Decisions that cut across
functions are some of the most important a company faces. In deed, cross-functional
collaboration has become an axiom of business, essential for arriving at the best answers for the
company and its customers. But uid decision making across functional teams remains a
constant challenge, even for companies known for doing it well, like Toyota and Dell. For in
stance, a team that thinks its more efficient to make a decision without consulting other

functions may wind up missing out on relevant input or being overruled by another team that
believes rightly or wrongly it should have been included in the process. Many of the most
important cross-function decisions are, by their very nature, the most difficult to orchestrate, and
that can string out the process and lead to sparring between efdoms and costly indecision.

Naveed Nazar

MBLE-13-05
Summary

Paul Rogers
Many companies often struggle to make decisions because too many people feel accountable - or
no one does."
One of the areas that the Shelton Leadership Center focuses upon is teaching effective decision
making. Were making a significant investment in trying to help individuals and teams learn and
apply principles of critical thinking and decision making. As one board member noted, One
key of high performing organizations is making good decisions and making them quickly.
I ran across Decide and Deliver, written by Marcia Blenko, Michael Mankins, and Paul
Rogers. They also wrote an earlier article (Jan 2006) in HBR entitled, Who has the D? In their
work, they note there can be three bottlenecks to quick and effective decisions even in high
performing organizations:
1. Global vs. Local decision making: Who has the authority to make the decisions and tailored
to local conditions? Is this a local decision (made by those closest to the front lines and facing
the customer)or one that has to be made at a centralized level for consistency across the
organization (who sees the big picture, sets broad goals, and overall strategic goals)?
2. Cross functional vs. Functional decision making: What roles should different elements
within cross functional teams play in the decision making?
3. Internal vs. External Partnerships: This occurs most frequently with strategic partnerships
and joint ventures. Which decisions must be made by members internal to the organization and
which decisions should be owned by the external partner?
Rogers and Blenko offer a decision making primer to think through who should make which
decisions using the acronym RAPID, although they caution the thinking does not need to
happen in this order:

R-Recommend: Who is responsible for recommending or proposing a course of action or

alternatives?
A: Agree: Who has to agree with and sign off on or veto the recommendation? (They suggest
only a few people have this veto power).
P: Perform: who is responsible for executing or implementing the recommendation
I: Input: Who has input or are consulted on the decision. These are usually those who are
typically involved in implementing the decision.
D: Decide: Who is the formal decision maker who is ultimately responsible for the decision and
has the authority to resolve any impasses in the decision making process and commit the
organization to action.
No single lever turns a company that struggles to make and execute good decisions into a
decision-driven organization, of course, but you'll know your company is on track when
managers find they're spending less time in meetings wondering why they are there. And when
one person has the "D,"
By taking some practical steps, any company can become more effective, beginning with its next
decision.

Riaz Hussain

MBLE-13-14
Summary

I believe it is increasingly important, no matter what the size and complexity of your
organization is, to have a defined decision-making process. Having been a leader of extensive
global and regional underwriting and marketing business units that require many fast and
accurate decisions, my teams had no choice but to establish formal decision-making roles and
responsibilities.
Executing a strategic plan successfully depends upon the success or failure of the actual people
executing the plan to make good decisions. It stands to reason that if you can improve your
teams decision-making abilities then plan execution and results should also improve along the
way. The RAPID Decision Making Model goes a few steps further than what I call written
lines of authority and is an easy but effective way to instill professional decision making within
an organization.
According to a Bain and Company Study, the average organization has the potential to more than
double its ability to make and execute key decisions. On a decision-effectiveness scale of 0 to
100, the best companies score an average of 71, while most companies score only a 28

RAPID

RAPID was developed by Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko two Bain & Company
Consultants. Their article: Who has the D? How clear decision roles enhance
organizational performance

The descriptor RAPID describes the various roles and responsibilities for clear decision
making within an organization. With respect to critical decisions, it ultimately shows
how power flows through an organization and/or business unit.

The objective with this approach is to create a more formalized, participatory approach
towards decision-making process within an organization. It is also useful as a post
mortem tool to diagnose failed decisions to see what element or elements in the
RAPID process was/were lacking or missing so the next time a critical decision has to be
made so you are not repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

Implementing RAPID can be messy; it can reveal a convoluted and faulty decisionmaking process so there must be a full commitment to check egos at the door and
accept the need for adopting RAPID as part of an organizational improvement
initiative. If your organization is in flux, it may not be the appropriate time to implement
RAPID.

One of the pitfalls of this approach can be that it actually slows decision-making down.
Therefore, at the outset of a project it is recommended that you decide which projects will
follow RAPID and which ones will not.
What R.A.P.I.D. Stands For?

1. Recommend:

Making a proposal on a key decision, gathering input, and providing data and analysis to
make a sensible choice, in a timely fashion.

Consulting with input providers hearing and incorporating their views, and winning
their buy-in.

2. Agree:

Negotiating a modified proposal with the one who recommends if they have changes or
concerns to the original proposal.

Escalating unresolved differences and issues to the decider if A and R cannot resolve
their differences.

If necessary, exercising veto power over the recommendation.

3. Perform:

Executing a decision once its made.

Seeing that the decision is implemented properly and effectively.

4. Input:

Providing relevant facts to the one who recommends that shed light on the proposals
feasibility and practical implications.

5. Decide:

Serving as the single point of accountability.

Bringing the decision to closure by resolving any impasse in the decision-making

process.

Committing the organization to implementing the decision.

Shahid Ul Haq

MBLE-13-06
Summary

Every org try to improve their organization but with out rational decision making they did no
handle the problems which incurred in the organization. In the decision-making process there are
four common bottlenecks: global versus local, center versus business unit, function versus
function or inside versus outside partners.
Every company tries to improve their decision making and mostly they use the approach RAPID
Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input and Decide to help companies develop clear decisionmaking guidelines. Every company has its own decision maker those are rational but decision
maker can ruin any good system but it's an important start in clearing bottlenecks.
Making good decisions and making them happen quickly are the hallmarks of high-performing
organizations
In my view if you call meting make sure that by the end of every meeting you've clarified what is
the DECISION. This will enable you and your teams to move forward. The alternative is risk
averse and distributed decision making and a recipe for bureaucracy.

In local markets, who has makes the decision to change prices or create promotions?
Within what guardrails?

In prioritizing features, who has the decision-rights to cut a feature in order to hit a key
milestone?

In hiring a new employee, who makes the decision to hire? Who makes the decision to
fire? Do you have a "bar raiser" in your process who has the ability to block a hire?

There are hundreds of small and large decisions made by a business every day. As your team
grows, many decisions will be good ones, but many will be wrong in retrospect. Some will
embarrass you. But if you don't know who made them, or who is empowered, decisions won't
happen.