Decision Scientist

The point

Everything that happens for, to, from your business is the result of a decision you make or don't. Are you an astute asymmetric results focused investor or a profligate risky speculator?

Jay Abraham · Two Day Rapid-Result "Instant Immersion" — Day 2 Cued to 5:29:25 1 min 35 sec loading…

Why it matters

Everything that happens for your business, to your business and from your business is the result of a decision you make — or do not make. That is not a motivational line, it is an accounting identity. And choosing not to choose is still a decision; it simply costs you without ever appearing on a list of things you did. So the question is what kind of investor you are with your own money, time and attention. An astute, asymmetric, results-focused investor — or a profligate, risky speculator. A javelin thrower or a mud thrower. The scientist rests a decision on the dynamics actually in play, the options genuinely available, and the probability of the outcome. The speculator throws and hopes something sticks. Two mistakes take most of it. The first is asymmetry nobody notices: all the decision energy goes on the upside and almost none on mitigating the downside that can end you — when mitigating the downside is exactly what funds more upside. To the wrong risk, the answer is fast and absolute. Hell no. The second is dismissing small decisions, when every strategy in this programme is built to hand you a low-risk shift, and it is the stack of them that produces the return.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Pouring every hour of decision energy into growing revenue and cutting costs, and almost none into avoiding the one downside that can wipe the whole thing out. The upside decisions are the enjoyable ones, which is precisely why they crowd out the other pan of the scale.

The test: Name the last decision you declined because the downside could end you. If you cannot think of one, you have not been weighing both pans — you have been counting upside.

Where it shows up — 8 worked examples

Who	What happened
Progressive Insurance	Refused to accept the industry's rough averages and made finer risk reading the decision the whole company was organised around.
Blackstone	Bought the largest United States office portfolio for about $39 billion having already picked what to sell — optionality, not one undifferentiated bet.
Nintendo	Declined the graphics-and-horsepower arms race entirely and built the Wii around motion and family play instead.
ARM	Chose not to manufacture chips at all. Licensing the architecture to everyone who did put it beneath the whole industry.
Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger	Redeployed the float from a fading stamp business into See's Candies for about twenty-five million dollars.
TransDigm	Decided that boring, hard-to-substitute, sole-source aerospace parts were worth more than visible products with many competitors.
Cirque du Soleil	Cut the animals and the star performers rather than competing on them. Over one hundred and fifty million spectators in under twenty years.
Hermès	The rare company whose advantage comes from saying no. It refuses to flood the market, and scarcity compounds desire and pricing power.

What it solves

The words a business owner uses for this before anybody has told them the name of it. If one of these is a sentence you have said out loud, this is your strategy.

We are always deciding and never deciding“There are four things on my desk I have been not-deciding for a month, and the not-deciding is costing us.”A written frame — dynamics, options, probability, downside — that turns a stalled decision into a made one inside an afternoon.
All our planning is about upside“Every forecast in this business is about what happens if it goes well. Nobody has written down what happens if it does not.”The other pan of the scale weighed explicitly, and a fast, absolute no to the risks that could end the business outright.
One bad call nearly took us out“We made a decision two years ago that nearly finished us, and I still do not know what we should have looked at.”The three things a decision has to rest on, applied before the commitment rather than reconstructed afterwards.
Small improvements feel beneath us“We keep passing over small changes because they do not feel like they will move the needle.”The case for the stack — every low-risk shift counted, so the return comes from the sum of them instead of from one large bet.
Everything takes five times as long“We have taken four or five big swings in three years and I could not tell you now what the reasoning was behind any of them.”The difference between the javelin thrower and the mud thrower — a decision rested on dynamics, options and probability, so you can say afterwards why you made it.
The advisor's version“Clients bring me decisions already framed as this or that, and I answer the question they asked rather than the one underneath it.”A frame you can put on a client's decision in ten minutes that surfaces the options they never listed and the downside they never priced.

The challenge

Write the hell-no list.

Take the three decisions in front of you right now and write, for each, three things: the dynamics actually in play, the options genuinely available, and the probability you would put on the outcome. Then write the downside that would end you if it landed, and mark that decision hell no or acceptable. Most owners have never once written the downside down, and it is the shortest of the four.

How you will know it is done Three live decisions written out with dynamics, options, probability and downside, each marked hell no or acceptable, and shown to your pod.

The AI layer · second pass

Once this is working, here is what to multiply

Improve the system first. Then multiply it. This panel is the second run at the strategy above, and it is deliberately useless until the first run is done.

Before you point anything at this You have written the downside of three decisions by hand, marking each acceptable or hell no.

What it multiplies Holding the dynamics, the options and the probabilities of every pending decision at once, and pricing the downside pan of the scale before you commit.

The trap Speculating faster. A model asked for options will produce forty of them, all plausible, none weighed against the loss that ends you — and forty confident options is a mud thrower with a bigger bucket, not a javelin.