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Jeffrey Yi-Lin Forrest
Jeananne Nicholls · Kurt Schimmel
Sifeng Liu
Managerial
Decision
Making
A Holistic Approach
Managerial Decision Making
Jeffrey Yi-Lin Forrest • Jeananne Nicholls
Kurt Schimmel • Sifeng Liu
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Synopsis
The purpose of this volume is to provide managers and entrepreneurs with a readily
available tool to support their daily decision-making so that they know their deci-
sions are mostly reliable and made on the basis of a sound scientific foundation, and
scholars with a brand new approach to the research of managerial decision-making.
To accomplish this practically significant and theoretically important outcome,
instead of data mining and anecdotal analysis, this book establishes results by
employing systems science and logic reasoning in general and the systemic yoyo
model in particular. This abstract while intuitive in approach avoids all the serious
limitations of econometric methods and anecdotal analyses.
This book is composed of five parts, entitled, respectively, “The Theoretical
Foundation”; “The Present Era of Transient Competitive Advantages”; “The Inno-
vativeness of Firms: Seen from Within”; “Development of Nationally Self-Sustained
Momentum of Growth”; and “Going International or Staying Domestic?” The first
part introduces the relevant details of systems science needed for the rest of this book
and establishes a general theory on the dynamics of market competition and when
and how micro entrants would enter a well-occupied market. The second part
focuses on the fact that the business world is presently in the era of transient
competitive advantages, where the once sustainable advantages become transient
and short-lived. It explains why markets evolve faster and consumers become less
patient than ever before, why companies are under both internal and external
pressures to compete, and how companies can successfully ride the waves of
transient competitive advantages.
The third part addresses the issue of how a firm can survive and succeed by
looking internally at the concept of firms’ innovativeness, which is the origin of
growth. It investigates which of the numerous internal factors, identified empirically
by many different scholars in the past, are actually the primary determinants of firms’
innovativeness and which ones are secondary. Such knowledge is practically sig-
nificant because managers and entrepreneurs can now focus their time and effort on
developing the primary determinants instead of wasting resources on the secondary
ones. The fourth part looks at the national economy by addressing the problem of
v
vi Synopsis
vii
viii Preface
first, at the stage of conjecturing the hypotheses and second, at the stage of
econometrically analyzing the data. It is because from the same set of evidences,
different conclusions can be drawn depending on the decision-maker’s background
and because econometric tools are all, without any exception, constrained by their
respectively strict requirements.
Based on this recognition, this book attempts to develop a general theory of
managerial decision-making on the basis of a few elementary postulates, by
employing logic as the method of reasoning and the systems science in general,
and the systemic yoyo model in particular, as the intuitive playground. By doing so,
we are able to take individually background-based guesswork out of the develop-
ment of the theory. Due to this reason, all established conclusions are expected to be
generally employable in real-life applications.
Different from all branches of mathematics that are based on numerical variables,
such as calculus, and various methods of econometrics, systems science focuses on
the investigation of organizations and structures. That is why we adopt systems
science as our way of intuitively seeing how business entities behave in their
interactions with each other, because business entities generally possess their respec-
tively different, yet rich, internal structures. For example, each firm has its specific
organizational culture, tradition, operational routines, etc., constituting the unique
background on which the firm forms its particular understanding out of what the
market is presenting. Differences in these internal structures lead to varied firm-
specific understandings of the same market signal. And, it is these internal organi-
zational structures that make systems science more readily and more adequately
employable for us to study business decision-making than any of the other available
tools developed on numbers or numerical variables, such as calculus and statistics.
Here, calculus helps decision-makers to make predictions by extrapolating the
present situation (also known as the initial value) into the future, while statistics
expand the past trend (also known as data or anecdotes) into the future. However,
managerial decision-making is more or less about predicting such a future that is
drastically different from both the present and the past. That explains why there is an
urgent need for the theory of managerial decision-making to go beyond the capa-
bility boundaries of the classical calculus-based methods and statistics-based tools.
Although the concepts of numbers (and numerical variables) and systems are
abstracted out of the same physical world, they represent the world from two
different and harmonizing angles. In particular, when a business organization is
treated as a collection of unrelated people, properties, etc., the concept of numbers
comes into play. For example, firm X employs n employees, occupies m office
buildings, etc. On the other hand, when the organization of the firm is viewed
holistically, then the concept of systems naturally emerges. For example, this firm
X is really a binding platform that connects such elements as employees, capital
assets, properties, etc. to form an organic whole. It is these relationships that the firm
exists both physically and intellectually. In other words, most problems of manage-
rial decision-making are essentially about organizations or systems, be they individ-
uals, seen as economic agents whose behaviors are dictated by their personal value
systems, firms, markets, industries, economies, etc.
Preface ix
Even though the concepts of numbers and systems share the same origin—the
natural world—they represent two very different aspects of the world. The former is
small scale and local, while the latter is large scale and organizational. More
importantly, numbers exist only postexistence. That is why using number-based
theories to make predictions has not been very successful, just as we discussed
earlier about calculus and statistics. In other words, when one uses post-event
evidence to predict the appearance of a not-yet-occurring event is doomed to be
not very successful. On the other hand, systems emerge at the same time when
physical or intellectual existence comes into being. That is the very reason why the
methodology of systems is more appropriate than all theories developed on numbers
and variables for the investigation of economic entities when their internal structures
cannot be ignored.
As promised, this book presents a general theory of managerial decision-making
with results generally applicable in practice. At the same time, we attempt to make
this theory satisfy the following conditions:
1. It is reader-friendly to as many people as possible.
2. It coincides with people’s intuition.
3. It possesses certain beauty that can be felt easily.
4. It is capable of producing meaningful results and insights for practical purposes.
As is argued by Y. Lin (2009) in the monograph Systemic Yoyos: Some Impacts of
the Second Dimension (CRC Press, New York), only with these characteristics, the
theory developed herein has a chance to enjoy a glorious and long-lasting life.
In particular, to satisfy condition 1, each and every theoretical result presented in
this book will be accompanied by nontechnical explanations. In other words, the
arguments, be they logical or systemic or both, can be skipped over without affecting
the reading of the rest of the book. To satisfy condition 2, established results will be
illustrated as much as possible with systemic intuitions so that the reader can see why
the results are generally true. To satisfy condition 3, various figurative presentations
of the systemic yoyo model are provided. And to satisfy condition 4, this book
considers an array of exciting topics where managerial decision-making is always
located at the center square. In particular, among others, we will carefully and in
details look at the following topics:
1. How market competition plays out dynamically
2. How monopoly can possibly lead profit stagnation
3. How markets always signal their invitation for competition and innovation
4. What makes markets evolve faster and consumers less patient
5. What a firm needs to do to successfully ride the waves of transient competition
advantages
6. What factors internal to a firm primarily determine the innovativeness of the firm
7. What a national government could do to foster the development of a self-
sustained momentum of economic growth
8. Whether or not a firm should consider going international or just staying domestic
9. How such trade behaviors as dumping and antidumping interact with each other.
x Preface
We hope that you, the reader, will enjoy reading and referencing this book in
your real-life decision-making practice and scholarly exploration. If you have any
comments or suggestions, please let us hear from you by dropping us a message.
Jeffrey Yi-Lin Forrest can be reached at [email protected] or jeffrey.
[email protected], Professor Jeananne Nicholls at [email protected],
Professor Kurt Schimmel at [email protected], and Professor Sifeng Liu at
sfl[email protected].
This book contains many research results previously published in various sources.
We are grateful to the copyright owners for permitting us to use the material. They
include
Emerald Publishing
Gordon & Breach Science Publishers (Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, and
New York)
Hemisphere (New York)
International Association for Cybernetics (Namur, Belgium)
International Federation for Systems Research (Vienna, Austria)
International Institute for General Systems Studies, Inc. (Slippery Rock,
Pennsylvania)
Kluwer Academic and Plenum Publishers (Dordrecht, Netherlands, and New York)
MCB University Press (Bingley, UK)
Northeastern Association of Business, Economics and Technology
Pergamon Journals, Ltd. (Oxford)
Scientific Research – An Academic Publisher
Springer Nature
Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
World Scientific Press
Wroclaw Technical University Press (Wroclaw, Poland)
xi
Contents
xiii
xiv Contents
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
About the Authors
xvii
xviii About the Authors
This chapter describes the challenge this book will address that faces decision-
making managers and entrepreneurs and explains why there is an urgent need to
resolve related issues in order to meet the challenge. After this challenge is clearly
presented, this chapter turns its attention to illustrate why systems science and
systems methodologies are the appropriate approach for managers and entrepreneurs
to use in their daily decision-making while pointing out weaknesses existing in the
widely employed methodologies – anecdotal analysis, calculus-based tools, and
statistics-based methods.
The rest of the chapter is organized as follows: Section 1.1 describes the very
issue this book attempts to address. Section 1.2 introduces the basics of systems
approach and explains why it is an appropriate tool for studying issues of managerial
decision-making. Section 1.3 focuses on the topic of scientific irregularity – what it
is, why it appears, and how it influences the lives of decision-making managers and
entrepreneurs. Section 1.4 details the contributions of this work. And Sect. 1.5
concludes this introductory chapter by outlining the contents of this book.
There are major differences between natural and social sciences. For example, in
natural science, scholars traditionally investigate lifeless objects and the operational
laws underneath the evolutions of physical things. Experience and rapid develop-
ment of technology of the past several hundred years have witnessed the magnificent
success of this approach. And, in social science, academics widely examine events
and social processes involving people based on past data and known anecdotes,
producing various data-specific and/or anecdote-specific theories hoping that they
can be generally applicable to scenarios beyond the limitations of the original data
and anecdotes. As consequences, in natural science, predictions are produced based
on the basic laws; their accuracies can be checked quite readily later on by
comparing what are predicted and what actually happens over time. And, in social
science, predictions are generally made by using data or anecdotes of the past
through extrapolating the existing pattern observed in the data or anecdotes into
the future. However, the accuracies of the predictions are very difficult to check,
because after learning about what is expected (or predicted), human participants
generally modify their behavioral patterns according to their respective needs for the
future to be. For example, when meteorologists forecast what weather conditions are
forthcoming, the prediction does not have any bearing on the occurrence of the
weather event. However, when influential financial analyzers predict how the stock
market is going to move, be it upward or downward or sideway, in the coming weeks
or months, individual investors generally position themselves accordingly, making
the prediction mostly incorrect.
Because the methodologies and approaches used in natural and social sciences are
different, scientists tend to use affirmative terms to state their conclusions, while
scholars in social science generally use such words as “believe,” “should,” and
“would.” For example, Kotler et al. (2010), Krauss (2011), and Stengel (2011)
believe that today’s customers want to be treated as whole human beings and be
acknowledged that their needs go beyond pure consumerism. In this instance, the
word “believe” means, scientifically speaking, that these scholars are not quite sure
about the correctness of what they are saying. Because Philip Kotler is considered as
one of the most influential marketing thinkers (Kaul 2012), the example given above
simply indicates that most decisions in the area of marketing are made based on
anecdotes or data mining or both so that the decision-maker also knows that his/her
decision could be wrong in general and when applied to scenarios beyond the
limitations of the data or anecdotes employed in their studies. In fact, in natural
science and mathematics, neither anecdotes nor data mining are recognized as
reliable ways to produce dependable theorems and theories beyond potential facts
finding; and by employing data mining, one can also easily discover “realities” that
only exist with the particular sets of data used in the analyses (Lin and OuYang
2010).
When we narrow our general discussion in the previous paragraphs to the case of
managerial decision-making, the following situation emerges, representing a great
and exciting opportunity of scholarly research. When a technological breakthrough
appears, by using the laws of science, engineers from different parts of the world are
generally able to design and produce a similar technology without knowing the
protected details of the original breakthrough. However, contrary to this situation in
natural science, the case with managerial decision-making is not the same. For
example, by closely observing business successes and by theorizing the reasons
why these successes are achieved, people generally cannot duplicate the desired
economic outcomes in another business setting in other parts of the world. To this
end, the Industrial Revolution of England and the magnificent success of the Silicon
Valley (California) are two of many such instances. Many developing countries have
tried very hard in the past 100 plus years to launch their own versions of Industrial
Revolution without luck (Rostow 1960; Wen 2016).
1.1 The Issue This Book Attempts to Address 3
Fig. 1.1 The blind men tempt to conceptualize what an elephant is like
want to explore the elephant in its entirety as much as possible before making their
inferences.
To address this question corresponding to our discussion here, let us return to
issues facing decision-making managers. When anecdotes and data are employed to
formulate hypotheses, one always runs into such problems as sampling error,
missing representation, etc. For example, in the study of market entry and entry
timing, conclusions have been drawn on the available data of some successes, while
those data of failed attempts are simply not available (Zachary et al. 2015). In the
analysis of the innovativeness of manufacturing firms, the very concept of innova-
tiveness is defined in dissimilar ways partially due to the reason of data availability,
while specific-data-backed conclusions are universally stated (Becheikh et al. 2006).
In the investigation of the relationship between a firm’s market reach – domestic, or
importing, or exporting, or any combination of these three options – and its perfor-
mance, conclusions are mostly drawn on the data collected from a few developed
countries because data from other countries are simply not available (Wagner 2012a,
b). In the examination of the Industrial Revolution, most needed data are not possible
to collect, because the event occurred long time ago and the process leading to the
eventual recognition of the Revolution traversed a few hundred years (Rostow
1960). In all these listed and other unlisted studies, the “blind men” are the
researchers, who are only allowed to “feel” particular parts of the underlying
population, although they want to explore more than what is allowed. Hence, in
terms of managerial decision-making, managers have to ask themselves the follow-
ing question:
How much can they place their faith on the “general” conclusions derived empirically in
their decision-making?
Other than what is discussed above, two additional issues that are worthy of our
attention are that (1) from the same set of evidences, different conclusions can be
drawn depending on the decision-maker’s background and knowledge structure, and
(2) econometric tools, which are widely used in testing hypotheses, are all, without
any exception, constrained by their, respectively, strict requirements.
Summing up the discussions in the previous paragraphs, the issue this book
attempts to address is how to
Develop a general theory of managerial decision-making in a similar fashion as that is
commonly the approach used in mathematics and natural science.
That is, on the basis of a few elementary postulates, general conclusions are derived
through logic reasoning on the intuition of a playground that is appropriate for us to
imagine how organizations evolve and interact with each other. Considering the fact
that the concept of systems is the right tool for visualizing structures and organiza-
tions, this book will employ systems science in general and the systemic yoyo model
in particular as the intuitive playground. By doing so, we are able to take individually
background-based guesswork out of the development of the theory. And because of
this very reason, all established conclusions in this book are expected to be generally
employable in real-life applications.
6 1 Facing the Challenge Holistically
Different from all branches of mathematics that are based on numerical variables,
such as calculus, differential equations, etc., and various methods of econometrics,
systems science focuses on the investigation of organizations and structures or
various kinds of systems (Lin 1999; Klir 1985). Because business entities generally
possess their, respectively, different, yet rich, internal structures, we adopt systems
science in this book as our way of intuitively seeing how business entities evolve,
respectively, and behave in their interactions with one another.
System (or organization or structure) really exists everywhere, especially in
investigations of issues related to managerial decision-making. For example, each
human being is a very complex biological system, which is made up of smaller
systems. Simultaneously, the person is also a member of many social and economic
systems, such as a family, neighborhoods, communities, etc. Each day the person
interacts with a range of various man-made systems, such as a car, an ATM machine,
retail stores, the company she works for, etc. These systems, be they natural, social,
or artificial, interact with each other constantly. So, beyond employing the concepts
of numbers and variables to investigate problems and issues of managerial decision-
making, which has been what is mostly done in the literature, we see an urgent need
to employ the concept of systems and relevant methods to study events and social
and economic processes in order to obtain brand new while practically useful
understandings and conclusions. Here, what do we mean by “urgent”? When
employing readily developed methodologies to help with managerial decision-
making, we generally use either a calculus-based method or a statistics-based tool
or a combination of both. However, any calculus-based method in essence helps
decision-makers make predictions by extrapolating the present situation (or known
as the initial value) into the future, while each statistics-based tool expands the past
trend (or known as data or anecdotes) into the future. So, if we understand manage-
rial decision-making as being more or less about predicting such a future that is
drastically different from both the present and the past, then there is an urgent need
for the theory of managerial decision-making to go beyond the capability boundaries
of the classical calculus-based methods and statistics-based tools. In other words,
after having tried various methods developed for data mining and anecdote analysis
without producing many reliable scientific conclusions, now is the time for us to go
straight to the underlying fundamental principles underneath the surface of numbers,
numerical variables, and anecdotes that can lead to scientifically sound conclusions
and practically reliable consequences.
Historically, the concept of systems has been directly or indirectly introduced by
scholars in different disciplines over the recorded history in various languages. In
order not to deviate away from our main focus here, let us look at two recent cases as
examples. In the area of economics, Rostow (1960) wrote that: “The classical theory
of production is formulated under essentially static assumptions . . . to merge clas-
sical production theory with Keynesian income analysis . . . introduced the dynamic
variables: population, technology, entrepreneurship, etc. But . . . do so in forms so
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the wash of ocean, and his too who is parted from his fellows
by the zone that lies midmost among the four, the zone of
the tyrannous sun. From the jaws of that deluge flying
over many and mighty waters, we ask of you for our
country’s gods a narrow resting-place—the harmless 30
privilege of the coast, and the common liberty of water and
air. We shall be no disgrace to your kingdom, nor light
shall be the fame that men will blaze of you, nor shall
gratitude for your great bounty grow old, nor shall
Ausonia mourn the day when she welcomed Troy to her 35
heart. I swear by Æneas’ star, by his strong right hand,
known as such by all who have proved it in friendship or
in war, many have been the peoples, many the nations—nay,
scorn us not for that we accost you with fillets of suppliance
and words of prayer—who have sued for our company
and wished to make us one with them. But the
oracles of heaven, speaking as they only can, have driven
us to search out your realms. Hence sprang Dardanus; 5
hither Apollo bids us return, with the instance of high
command, even to Tuscan Tiber and the sacred waters of
Numicius’ spring. Moreover, here are presents from Æneas,
the scanty offerings of past prosperity, relics snatched from
the flames of Troy. From this gold his father, Anchises, 10
poured libations at the altar; this was Priam’s royal
accoutrement, when he gave laws in kingly fashion to the
assembled people; this sceptre, this sacred diadem, these
robes, the work of Trojan dames.”