You are required to write a report that analyses the business/management decisions in one of the summary examples presented. YOU MUST START YOUR ANALYSIS WITH A CYNEFIN EVALUATION OF THE DECISION MAKING ENVIRONMENT.

Decision Making Themes you could consider IN ADDITION TO CYNEFIN:

Situational complexity of decision making (CYNEFIN)

Decision Types

VJY Decision Making

Garbage Can Model of Decision Making

Rationality

Cynefin Framework

Decision Making (DM) styles

Power

Post modern view of power

Non linear thinking

Cognitive dissonance Decision Making

Behaviouralism in Decision Making

Humanism Decision Making

Simple/Tame decisions

Messy Problems

Wicked problems

Summary: Being flexible in making choices under uncertainty (2021-present)

Yamini Rangan of software company HubSpot, found herself tasked with assuming a replacement CEO role when the founder and then CEO of the company Brian Halligan, 54, broke 20 bones in a snowmobile accident. Rangan was asked to take charge for an indefinite period. For HubSpot there was a real risk of a leadership vacuum . Looking back, Rangan, says You dont have decisiveness, you dont have someone to make a decision, to call whats important.

Only a year into her original post of chief customer officer, the Indian-born executive then realised a conscious change in style was needed. Sometimes, in the past, she said she had just run from one job to the other, one transition to the other, not quite being reflective, thoughtful and deliberate. Rangan described that the key was to consciously fit the management style to the needs of the moment. You cannot and should not assume whatever has worked for you in the past is going to continue to work for you in the future, she says. Remarkably, this shift in responsibilities occurred in the midst of the pandemic and a boom in the software business. The critical lesson was of how adaptable and flexible you have to be in uncertain times, she says, but the stress and strain on decision makers is high.

I felt, both personally and as a company, weve really flexed and flexed, there were points where it felt like youre going to break, she says. And then weve been able to come back up. That resilience she says, has been sometimes draining, really draining. When Brian Halligan was ready to return, he opted for a position as full-time chair thus confirming his stand-in as the permanent CEO.

Rangan reflects that her rise to the CEO post of a $30bn valued company was difficult. Different values systems and beliefs between her home in India and her studies in and career development in the US forced a huge cultural adaptation. Equally fitting in with a new business culture also brought uncomfortable compromises. I was always the different person in the room, she says. Her first response was to copy what others were doing, before gaining the confidence in the past decade to set her own terms: This is not authentic, this is not who I am. I dont like golf. So Im not going to learn golf.

In the immediate crisis that followed Halligans accident, Rangan focused on two things: a united leadership group and decisiveness. It meant getting all the top executives to be open. Getting people involved in uncertain times is critical to decision success. When youre a new team, and you have a new kind of interim leader, the question is, what are you going to share? What are you not going to share? After that, it was about making sure that we made decisions quickly, and then communicate the why. Those were the things that are needed in any leadership vacuum.

It is all a stark contrast to the role Rangan was originally hired for. An engineer who had devoured the lessons from a decade spent at the more mature software companies Workday and Dropbox, she was brought in to instil some of the same disciplines at the fast-growing HubSpot. She calls it pattern recognition having the experience to recognise, from the data, how a company is running and what adjustments are needed for the next stage in its development. Fine-tuning data-driven businesses like this is both art and science, says Rangan.

Rangan introduced new performance metrics focused upon revenue retention rate, a key measure in the software industry. This measures customers that join the company, that stay with the company, that get value with the company, and continue to buy from the company. Its core. The additional uncertainty of the pandemic, when it hit, brought the need for an altogether different management style. The company was thrown on to a wartime footing, she says, forcing it to react quickly to help customers who themselves were facing a crisis.

Living in the San Francisco bay area when most of HubSpots operations are on the East Coast, so this and the pandemic required new techniques of remote management for hybrid working. The strains of the pandemic, and of finding new ways to work, have also brought a recognition that deeper changes are needed. At the company level, Friday has become a day without any meetings, to encourage reading and reflecting and making time for thoughtful decisions. It is a point underscored by research from Alexander et al (2020).

Rangan concludes by recognising that there is a scarcity of women running software companies, We dont have enough of us, thats a real issue. We need to have the floodgates open and have a pretty big shift in terms of the number of women the number of people of colour in leadership positions.