Someone offers you a trip, and it just might be to your dream destination. What would a 100% guarantee be worth to you? How about a 60% guarantee? Should that information have any value if it did not change your decision? The short answer is no. In the advanced decision modeling course, assistant professor Huseyin Gurkan takes students through the nitty-gritty of making decisions, introducing many of the finer points that only seem to emerge outside the classroom, when leaders are confronted with a difficult choice and visceral implications.
The MBA course builds on the material from the managerial analysis and decision-making course (taught at the program’s outset by Francis de Véricourt) and leads interested students deeper into what can be done when possibilities get messy.
As a part of the managerial analytics track at ESMT Berlin, students learn how to find the best case in complex mixes of costs, intangible benefits, probabilities, contingencies, and payoffs.
Tough examples from global health, nuclear energy, and corporate law expose the classroom to the rigors of picking a path in the real world when lives and livelihoods hang in the balance. Incorporating risk tolerance, as it changes by industry and position, is a pivotal component.
Nimbly treading the line of spontaneity and surgical precision, Huseyin’s course does not fixate upon details. With a deliberate approach, he emphasizes instead how those minutiae fit into the bigger picture. In doing so, the curriculum gives students an opportunity to look over the hills and valleys ahead, and chart a better course based on what they see.
Parallel universes are a controversial possibility; harder to dispute is the idea that decisions we make shape our reality as time moves forward. Few things are more valuable than being able to see the whole horizon.
The advanced decision modeling course shows that although we cannot fast-forward to see what’s ahead, with the right data and frameworks, we can ascend.
Learn more about the Full-time MBA program here.
