1. Build collective intuition that enhances the ability of top management team to see threats and opportunities sooner and more accurately.

a. Sharing information at must attend meetings is an essential part of building collective intuition. The interplay of ideas during these meetings enhances managers understanding of the data. Less successful top-management teams rarely meet with their colleagues in a group. These executives typically make fewer and larger strategic choices. When they do turn their attention to important decisions, they rely on market analyses and future trend projections that are idiosyncratic to the particular decision. Intuition is gained through experience, the ability to recognize pattern and process information in blocks. This Rapid pattern recognition is faster than processing single pieces of information.

b. Traditional approaches to strategy overemphasize the executives ability to analyze and predict which industries, competencies, or strategic positions will be viable and for how long. No advantage and no position is advantageous forever.

c. The ability to make fast, widely supported, and high quality strategic decisions on a frequent basis are the cornerstone of effective strategy.

2. Stimulate quick conflict to improve the quality of strategic thinking without sacrificing significant time.

a. In dynamic markets, conflict is a natural feature of high-stakes decision making because reasonable managers will often diverge in their views on how the marketplace will unfold. Strategic decision makers in rapidly changing markets not only tolerate conflict, they accelerate it.

b. One technique is scenario planning, creating advocate alternatives consider many future states. Remove stale thinking.

c. Another technique is to create multiple alternatives that the team can work with simultaneously. The teams come up with more varied viewpoints than homogenous teams. Teams rapidly compare alternatives and gain better understanding of their preferences. The multiple alternatives help the executives feel confident that they have not overlooked a superior alternative.

3. Maintain a disciplined pace that drives the decision process to a timely conclusion

a. Effective strategic decision makers focus on maintaining decision pace, keeping up the energy surrounding the process, and cutting off debate at the appropriate times. Decision makers use rules of thumb to determine time span to arrive at a decision. If a decision takes less time, then the decision is not strategic enough to warrant management team attention. Time frame allows executives time to adjust the scope of a decision to fit the allocated time frame as the process unfolds.

b. Typical strategic decisions including entering or exiting markets, investing in new technology, building manufacturing capacity, or forming strategic partnerships.

c. Decision making rhythm helps managers plan their process and forces them to recognize the familiar aspects of decision making that make the process more predictable. Decision timing being more important than consensus. Consensus is nice but keeping up with the time constraints is important.

4. Defuse political behavior that creates unproductive conflict and wastes time.

a. Lobbying one another, manipulating information, and forming coalitions is wasteful.

b. One way in which executives defuse politics is to create common goals.

c. The goals suggest the managers share a common shared vision of what they want.

d. A more direct way to defuse politics is through a balanced power structure in which each key decision maker has a clear area of responsibility, but in which the leader is the most powerful decision maker. (King Lear scenario)

e. Humor diffuse politics