How did the information in this unit change your thinking about business research? In what ways was this information familiar, and in what ways was it foreign? Discuss ways these ideas could be applied to questions or dilemmas you are facing at your current employment, at your own business venture, or within your personal life.

Your journal entry must be at least 200 words in length.

During Unit 1, we will be learning about the literature review: how it forms the foundation of the research proposal. The key to a successful literature review is alignment. You want to locate, synthesize, and organize a narrative summary of credible information sources that align with your key concepts of focus for your research study. With the abundance of information available via web-based searches, the danger is that you might get accidentally sidetracked into summarizing interesting but not directly relevant (to your proposed research topic) information sources.

In addition, you want to make sure that your information sources are credible. This means that assertions are substantiated with outside information. "Show me the data!"

In this way, your literature will represent "what we think we know so far" related to your key concepts of interest. Your study will be positioned as building on this base of existing knowledge.

When thinking about how decisions are made within organizations, what comes to mind? Often, business professionals and managers place trust in the wisdom and experience of corporate leadership teams, betting that their decisions based on experiences, intuition, conventional wisdom, and anecdotal evidence will be successful (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006). Rarely is a thorough and methodological analysis of the facts conducted, as would be done if the decision pertained to ones own personal health or financial situation. Given the fact that there is often a lot at stake in business decisions (e.g., revenue, profit, costs, jobs, reputation, etc.), evidence-based management should routinely be used to make those decisions. The following passages explain evidence-based management (EBM) and how it relates to business research.