Every entrepreneur faces tough decisions as their startup progresses. This Guide introduces resources to help you make data-driven and evidence-based decisions. As you learned critical skills for evidence-based decisions, it is worth reading articles such as When It's OK to Trust Your Gut on a Big Decision and understand when to follow your intuition.

The courses selected can be audited for free and you can find the audit instructions for Coursera and Edx courses.

Pivot or Proceed: How to Decide (Kauffman Foundation)

Every entrepreneur faces tough questions about the progress of their startup. Pivot? Proceed? Quit? Learn how to think about these challenges.

Making Evidence-Based Strategic Decisions (University System of Maryland)

Drive alignment among managers, employees and the organizational goals through data analytics and data products. This course on digital transformation will show you how to turn your organization into a decision-making factory.

Decision Making Under Uncertainty: Introduction to Structured Expert Judgment (Delft University of Technology)

Don't let the absence of data or the lack of appropriate data affect your decision-making. Learn how expert opinion can be used rigorously for uncertainty quantification.

Business Analytics for Data-Driven Decision Making (Boston University)

Learn how to lead your firm to make better business decisions using analytic methods and create competitive advantages from data.

Effective Decision Making: Dealing with Business Complexity (Delft University of Technology)

Learn how to solve complex problems in a business environment using analysis-based decision making. Part of the courses of DelftX's Leadership Essentials for Engineers.

Analytics for Decision Making (Babson College)

Discover the foundational concepts that support modern data science and learn to analyze various data types and quality to make smart business decisions.

Leading Digital and Data Decision Making (Arizona State University)

In this course, you will learn how leaders make managerial and relevant decisions based on data across multiple global industries. You will also explore how companies benefit from a digital ecosystem including sensors (IoT), Blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), and augmented reality (AR) that move data-driven insights from the data scientist to the boardroom.

Data-Driven Decision Making (DDDM) Specialization (University At Buffalo)

The three-course series explores how technology enables the collection and organization of unprecedented amounts of data, and how to dissect that data to gain powerful insights. Course topics include analyzing process maps for driving improvement, software for maximizing data analysis, statistical process control, creating metrics dashboards and translating data stories, and the connection between operations technology metrics and organizational performance, including:

• Data-Driven Process Improvement

• Data Analysis and Visualization

• Applied Analytics and Data for Decision Making

Customer Analytics (Wharton Online - The University of Pennsylvania)

This course provides an overview of key areas of customer analytics: descriptive analytics, predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics, and their application to real-world business practices including Amazon, Google, and Starbucks to name a few. This course provides an overview of the field of analytics so that you can make informed business decisions. It is an introduction to the theory of customer analytics, and is not intended to prepare learners to perform customer analytics.

Marketing analytics: Know your customers (Macquarie University)

Through structured learning activities (video lectures, quizzes, discussion prompts, industry interviews and written assessments) this course will teach you what to measure – and how – in order to maximize customer value.

Evidence-based Entrepreneurship: A Mindset for Startup Success (eCornell)

Although there are no guarantees in the startup world, applying evidence-based entrepreneurship principles can greatly increase your chances of creating a product or solution that truly addresses a customer need.

Evidence-based Entrepreneurship

Steve Blank presented at The Lean Startup Conference 2013.

Dynamic Decision Making: Five Approaches to Better Problem Solving (eCornell)

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn is the founder and CEO of Decisive, a decision sciences company using her AREA Method decision-making system for individuals, companies, and nonprofits to solve complex problems. Her research and decision-making system controls for bias, focuses on the incentives of others, and expands knowledge while improving judgment. Ms. Strauss Einhorn says, “Identifying and understanding where we begin and what we prioritize in our decision-making can help us strengthen key relationships and make our big decisions better.”

Make Big Decisions Better: 11 Myths To Stop Believing Now (eCornell)

Join us for this webinar with Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, creator of the AREA Method — a decision-making system for solving complex problems — to find out why we rely so heavily on decision-making myths, how these myths get perpetuated, and how to check yourself to make better decisions.

The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See (Harvard Business Review)

Features Max H. Bazerman, the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the author of Better, Not Perfect: A Realist’s Guide to Maximum Sustainable Goodness (Harper Business, 2020) and (with Don A. Moore) the forthcoming Decision Leadership (Yale University Press, 2022).

A Model for Creating a Data-Driven Culture (Harvard Business Review)

David Waller—head of data science and analytics for Oliver Wyman Labs discusses challenges companies face in shifting to a data-driven mindset and will share 10 data commandments to create and sustain a culture with data at its core.

Before You Make That Big Decision (Harvard Business Review)

Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony from McKinsey & Company described their research into organizational decision making and their guidelines for confronting bias and improving bottom-line decisions.

Using Data to Make Decisions in the Face of Uncertainty (Harvard Business Review)

Featuring Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, founder and CEO of Decisive, a decision sciences company. Einhorn has taught for years at Columbia Business School and Cornell, has won awards for her investigative news stories, and has authored two books on complex problem solving.

You can search Harvard Business Review to learn more articles on this topic. You can also check if your university library has a subscription to the Business Source Complete database, which provides full-text access to Harvard Business Review articles, or use the library’s interlibrary loan service to access the article.

• Founders, Apply the Scientific Method to Your Startup

• 11 Myths About Decision-Making

• When It's OK to Trust Your Gut on a Big Decision

• 10 Ways to Mitigate Bias in Your Company's Decision Making

• When to Stop Deliberating and Just Make a Decision

• The First Thing Great Decision Makers Do

• A Good Meeting Needs a Clear Decision-Making Process

• 3 Ways to Improve Your Decision Making

• When You Have to Carry Out a Decision You Disagree With

• Making Dumb Groups Smarter

Click the link to find a Worldcat book record; enter a zipcode to check which library nearby has the book you can borrow. When the record is not available, a link to Amazon is provided.

• Banasiewicz, Andrew D. Evidence-based Decision-Making: How to Leverage Available Data and Avoid Cognitive Biases. 2019. Print.

• Harvard Business Review. HBR's 10 Must Reads on Making Smart Decisions. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Review Press, 2013. Print.

• Harvard Business Review. HBR Guide to Data Analytics Basics for Managers. Boston, Mass: Harvard Business Review Press, 2018. Print.

• Heath, Dan. Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen. 2020. Print.

• Horowitz, Ben. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers. New York: Harper Business, 2014. Print.

• Atkinson, Sam. The Business Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained. 2018. Print.

• Marr, Bernard. Key Business Analytics: The 60+ Business Analysis Tools Every Manager Needs to Know. 2016. Print.

• Marr, Bernard. Key Performance Indicators for Dummies. 2015. Print.

• Page, Scott E. The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You. 2021. Print.

• Weinberg, Gabriel. Super Thinking: the Big Book of Mental Models. 2019. Print.

Read More Books on This Topic.

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn is the founder and CEO of Decisive, a decision sciences company using her AREA Method decision-making system for individuals, companies, and nonprofits to solve complex problems. Her research and decision-making system controls for bias, focuses on the incentives of others, and expands knowledge while improving judgment.

• Adopt Lean Startup Principles

• Understand Consumers and Find Product-Market Fit