Accept Or Decline? How To Evaluate And Respond To Opportunities

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Week 320 | Entrepreneurship Section | 1

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Accept Or Decline? How To Evaluate And Respond To Opportunities

By Britney Porter | Forbes Magazine | October 31, 2023

Extractive Summary of the Article | Listen

Opportunity management and developing systematic approaches to decision-making can help you achieve mastery over your success. You can accomplish this by designing unique frameworks for identifying and analyzing your business and personal goals, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, challenges, and risks.

Incorporating systematic analysis into your decision-making process will increase awareness and enhance your overall understanding of the factors involved in making decisions or developing strategies to maximize a goal or mission.  Here’s a simple step-by-step process:

1. Define The Objective: Start by clearly defining the purpose and the end goal of what is to be achieved. Organize a list that includes timeframes to identify progress and decide what milestones will lead up towards achieving the big goal, and what criteria are essential for accepting opportunities and making decisions.
2. Tailor Your Criteria: Determine the criteria of standards and expectations that will be used to evaluate opportunities or options. These categories should be relevant to the decision and specific enough to be measured objectively.
3. Scoring System: Create a scoring system, often on a points scale, for each criterion. For example, you might use a 1-10 scale for each criteria, with 10 being the highest score.
4. Scoring Guidelines: Develop clear ranking guidelines for each category, including expectations, goals, objectives, and standards, to maintain consistency in scoring across different sections and timelines.
5. Scoring Methodology: Determine how you will combine the scores. The simplest method is to add up all the scores within each category.
6. Thresholds And Eligibility: Set minimum acceptable scores or thresholds. Situations, opportunities, and options that do not meet the minimum thresholds should be eliminated from consideration immediately.
7. Comparison And Ranking: Compare scores and rank situations, opportunities or options based on their overall scores.
8. Decision Making: Use the ranking and scores to inform a decision. The opportunity, offer or option with the highest score should typically be the preferred choice.

Acquiring this skill can help you better organize your thoughts, stay prepared, and minimize distractions, ultimately leading to more equitable outcomes and opportunities.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Opportunity management and developing systematic approaches to decision-making can help you achieve mastery over your success. You can accomplish this by designing unique frameworks for identifying and analyzing your business and personal goals, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, challenges, and risks.
2. Incorporating systematic analysis into your decision-making process will increase awareness and enhance your overall understanding of the factors involved in making decisions or developing strategies to maximize a goal or mission.
3. A simple step-by-step process for opportunity evaluation is: Define The Objective.  Determine the criteria of standards and expectations that will be used to evaluate opportunities or options.   Develop clear ranking guidelines for each category, including expectations, goals, objectives, and standards.  Determine how you will combine the scores.  Set minimum acceptable scores or thresholds.  Compare scores and rank situations, opportunities or options based on their overall scores.  And use the ranking and scores to inform a decision.

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Topics:  Decision-making, Risk, Opportunities