In his blog, Jason captured how we handle decisions at J&R- someone is in charge of making the decision. That person generally listens to all opinions and then makes the decision based on what they feel is the best course of action. This kind of decision-making respects everyone, but still forces a single person to choose a course of action. When I started in management, I struggled a lot with the level of input to accept from people. On one hand, I wanted to appear to be a strong leader, so I was willing to make decisions based on my own opinion. On the other hand, I wanted everyone to accept the choices made, so I looked for a consensus. I am sure that this frustrated people who were affected by my decisions. Over time, I came to the conclusion that the process that Jason describes is the right approach for myself and the company. Recently, I read a book called Leading IT: The Toughest Job In The World, by Bob Lewis. Lewis is a noted columnist for InfoWorld and has a weekly email newsletter called Keep the Joint Running. Both the column and the newsletter deal with IT and IT management. Chapter 3 in Leading IT is called "Making Decisions". In this chapter, Lewis states that making decisions is the central aspect of being a leader. He describes 5 types of decision making processes:

• Authoritarianism - The leader decides what to do solely


• Consensus - The leader makes all stakeholders uniformly agree with the decision


• Consultation - The leader consults with stakeholders and then makes a decision


• Delegation - The leader delegates the decision to someone else


• Democracy - The leader choose the most popular decision from the stakeholders

Lewis describes the pros and cons for each of these, but comes to the conclusion that the one that scores the highest in terms of Speed, Buy-in, Cost, and Quality is Consultation, which is the technique that we use at J&R. From my experience, I think that Lewis is right on. And so is Jason.