Indies Education · Business Curriculum
Decision Making
Use evidence, explicit trade-offs, and review loops to make better calls under uncertainty.
What-If Analysis: Scenarios, Sensitivity, and Action
What-if analysis asks how outcomes change when assumptions or events differ. This chapter distinguishes sensitivity, scenario, stress, break-even, and simulation methods; explains model validation, correlated inputs, thresholds, decision rules, communication, and the dangers of treating a spreadsheet as reality.
Impact Analysis: Map Consequences Before You Act
Impact analysis examines what a change will affect before commitment and what it did affect afterward. This chapter integrates stakeholder, process, technical, financial, risk, behavioral, and temporal consequences; explains dependency tracing, uncertainty, change propagation, safeguards, validation, and post-implementation learning.
Business Experiments: Design Evidence That Decides
Business experiments turn uncertain strategic and operating assumptions into causal evidence. This chapter covers estimands, randomization, controls, power, interference, instrumentation, guardrails, sequential decisions, heterogeneity, external validity, ethics, implementation, and how to distinguish experimentation from shipping and watching a dashboard.
Cost-Benefit Analysis: A Practical Business Guide
A rigorous, practical guide to compare incremental benefits and costs against a credible counterfactual while making timing, risk, externalities, distribution, and non-monetized effects visible. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into coordinated action.
Break-Even Analysis: Formula, Limits and Scenarios
A rigorous, practical guide to calculate and stress-test the volume, revenue, utilization, or time required for incremental contribution to cover relevant fixed commitments. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into coordinated action.
NPV and IRR: A Rigorous Investment Guide
A rigorous, practical guide to evaluate investments with incremental cash flows, defensible discount rates, explicit scenarios, and a clear understanding of when NPV and IRR disagree. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into.
Cash Flow Forecasting: Build a Reliable Model
A rigorous, practical guide to forecast the timing and uncertainty of receipts and payments so leaders can protect liquidity, plan financing, and act before cash constraints become crises. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn.
Analytic Hierarchy Process: A Complete Guide
A rigorous, practical guide to structure complex multi-criteria decisions into hierarchies, elicit pairwise judgments, calculate priorities, test consistency, and examine sensitivity. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into coordinated action.
Conjoint Analysis: Design and Interpret Trade-Offs
A rigorous, practical guide to estimate how people trade product or service attributes by designing realistic choice tasks, modelling preferences, and translating results cautiously into decisions. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into.
Pareto Analysis: Find the Vital Few Responsibly
A rigorous, practical guide to identify the vital few contributors to a defined outcome while preserving denominators, severity, uncertainty, and the long tail. It combines a defensible decision model, a worked business case, implementation steps, measurement architecture, ethical guardrails, leadership questions, and field exercises for operators who need to turn analysis into coordinated action.
Decision Trees: A Rigorous Managerial Guide
Decision trees make sequential choices, uncertain events, probabilities, and consequences visible. This chapter teaches construction, rollback calculation, sensitivity analysis, value of information, risk attitude, a worked investment case, governance, and the limits of expected value.
QSPM: A Rigorous Strategic Planning Guide
The Quantitative Strategic Planning Matrix compares strategic alternatives against weighted internal and external factors. This chapter explains factor selection, weights, attractiveness scores, total scores, sensitivity analysis, a worked portfolio case, governance, and QSPM’s important limits.