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Biz Dev Forum
April 28, 2022 @ 7:30 am - 9:30 am
How To Make Good Business Decisions When Everything Keeps Changing
In order to succeed and grow, businesses must create plans. A good plan is vital to directing the long-term trajectory of an organization. But sometimes unexpected problems arise. In business planning, it is rare that everything goes exactly as expected. A more realistic assumption is to accept that everything is always changing. So what do we do when things don’t go as planned? Our strategic plans need to be flexible and adaptable, all while keeping our ultimate goals in mind. This requires envisioning scenarios that could happen and thinking about what mitigations can be potentially put in place to reduce the impacts of disruptions to the plan. It also involves scanning the horizon for indicators that signal a disruption is about to occur. Finally, it requires not only being able to mitigate the downsides of changes, but creatively thinking about how to benefit from opportunities brought about by a changing environment.
Light breakfast is provided
Zachary A. Collier is President of Collier Research Systems, a consultancy providing decision-making and analytics services for clients across industries including defense, healthcare, education, and real estate. He is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Management at Radford University. His research and consulting interests include Risk Analysis and Decision Analysis, which he applies to problems at the intersection of technological, organizational, and societal domains. He is an active member of the Society for Risk Analysis where he has held various leadership positions such as President of the Decision Analysis and Risk Specialty Group and President of the Resilience Analysis Specialty Group. Dr. Collier is a Fellow of the Center for Risk Management of Engineering Systems at University of Virginia, a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Hardware and Embedded Systems Security and Trust (CHEST), and contributes as a subject matter expert to the development of industry standards through SAE International.
His prior work experience includes the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, where he was a member of the Risk and Decision Science Team and served as PI and Co-PI on a number of interdisciplinary research projects totaling over $1M. He has also held consulting positions in the area of accident reconstruction.
He is Managing Editor of the Springer journal “Environment Systems & Decisions”, and has published over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers on topics related to decision modeling, risk analysis, and resilience. He earned his Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from University of Virginia, a Master of Engineering Management from Duke University, and a Bachelor of Science from Florida State University.