Strategic Decision-Making by Mark Phillips

Strategic Decision-Making by Mark Phillips

Uncertainty is not the absence of knowledge. It is the presence of possibility.

Mark Phillips has spent a career making high-stakes decisions in the automotive and software industries, and over fifteen years working with probabilistic machine learning. In this groundbreaking book, he brings that experience to a practitioner's case that uncertainty is not a problem to be solved but is where strategy operates. The result is an orientation, not a formula: reading decisions as option surfaces, holding possibilities open, acting at the last responsible moment rather than the first available one.

Rather than argue from theory alone, Phillips lets the cases do the work. A wholesale auto auction reveals how markets price what cannot be known. Hospitals during COVID-19 show decision-making when the model breaks. China's watch and auto industries demonstrate patient optionality dismantling entrenched incumbents. Each builds toward one proposition. Optionality is the weapon of the strategically patient against the conventionally powerful.

For executives, professionals, students, and consultants, this is a master class in turning uncertainty into strategic advantage.

Mark Phillips is the author of Reinventing Communication: How to Design, Lead and Manage High Performing Teams, the editor of The Practitioners’ Handbook on Project Performance: Agile, Waterfall and Beyond, and numerous articles, blog posts and presentations. He is a senior executive in the automotive industry and can be found at reinventingcommunication.com.