Business Strategies for a Messy World Tools for Systemic Problem-Solving

The need to examine and challenge a host of critical, taken-for-granted assumptions is one of the most important tasks facing managers and leaders daily. Beyond recognizing the need to examine and challenge key assumptions, managers and leaders must develop a systematic way of surfacing and critiquing important assumptions, let alone keeping track of them over time so that key business strategies can change as important underlying assumptions change.

Using current business examples and academic research, Tools for Systematic Problem-Solving educates managers and executives on how to systematically examine key assumptions to ensure survival and success for their organizations.

Vincent Barabba is the Co-founder and Chairman Market Insight Corporation which created MyProductAdvisor.com. He is also the Chairman of the State of the US. He retired in 2003 as the general manager of corporate strategy and knowledge development at the General Motors Corporation where he played a critical role in the development of OnStar. Mr. Barabba is a member of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission and twice served as director of the U.S. Bureau of the Census. He is the only person to have been appointed to that position by U.S. Presidents of different political parties. He has been appointed to government positions by five Presidents: Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and James Earl Carter to be Census Bureau Director; and Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush to be the U.S. Representative to the Population Commission of the United Nations. Between his government service and GM assignments he served as the manager of market research for the Xerox Corporation and director of market intelligence for Eastman Kodak. Mr. Barabba was the co-founder of Decision Making Information and from 1969 to 1973 provided electoral information to political campaigns from City Hall to the Presidency. He has also served on the board of directors for the Marketing Science Institute, the American Institutes for Research, and the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago.
 
Ian I. Mitroff is an Adjunct Professor at Saybrook University San Francisco. He is also a Senior Investigator in the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, University of California, Berkeley. He is an Adjunct Professor of Health Policy, School of Public Health, St. Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri. He is Professor Emeritus from the Annenberg School of Communication and the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, where he was the Harold Quinton Distinguished Professor of Business Policy. He is the President of the consulting firm Comprehensive Crisis Management. He is regarded as the founder of the discipline of Crisis Management. He was the founder and director of the USC Center for Crisis Management. Known for his thinking and writing on a wide range of business and societal issues, Dr. Mitroff is the author of 28 previous books, including 'Dirty Rotten Strategies: How We Trick Ourselves and Others into Solving the Wrong Problems Precisely,' 'A Spiritual Audit of Corporate America,' 'Smart Thinking for Crazy Times,' 'The Essential Guide to Managing Corporate Crisis,' 'The Unbounded Mind' and 'Managing Crises Before They Happen.'

1. Chaparral Steel - A Model Systems Design
2. Critical Arguments - TAS, The Toulmin Argumentation Schema
3. Assumptions - Strategic Assumption Surfacing and Testing (SAST)
4. A Critical Application - The U.S. Census Bureau
5. Complex Messy Systems
6. Synthesis - Putting It All Together
Appendix: The 2005 Census Privacy SAST