Making the Toughest Calls

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 8 September 2016

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Joseph Badaracco, Harvard Business School professor, explains what to do when no decision feels like a good decision. He is the author of "Managing in the Gray: Five Timeless Questions for Resolving Your Toughest Problems at Work."

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Closer Podcast brings you the inside story of deals changing the world, told by the people who know how it all went down.
0:09.0	Understand the human motivations behind groundbreaking business decisions with host Amy Keene.
0:14.6	Listen to The Closer, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBRIBA cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green from Michael. Today I'm
0:34.8	talking with Joseph Botarocco, professor at Harvard Business School, and author of
0:38.8	the new book Managing in the Gray. Joe, thank you so much for coming in.
0:42.3	Great to be here, Sarah. So when you talk about in the gray. Joe, thank you so much for coming in.
0:42.6	Great to be here, Sarah.
0:44.1	So when you talk about managing in the gray and managing gray area decisions, what do you mean by that?
0:49.9	Is this sort of a lesser of two evils type choice or you know a situation where the
0:54.4	answer is not clear or is the question more you know is there a sort of
0:58.2	obvious right choice but it's more about do you have the fortitude to take that
1:01.8	path good question it's basically a situation do you have the fortitude to take that path? Good question.
1:03.8	It's basically a situation where the problem or the issues or whatever they are in front of you
1:08.5	are sort of profoundly unclear.
1:11.4	So they may look like lesser of two evils, but sometimes you're not sure what to
1:15.2	count is evil. In other words, there's always uncertainty in management decisions, of course.
1:20.4	But here, a lot of basic facts are just missing and you can't get a hold of them
1:26.0	And sometimes you don't know how to frame the problem either you know if you can frame a problem say it's a marketing problem or something you put it in a box and you often know how to deal with it.
1:35.2	And then the other sign is that people you work with look at the same situation and they disagree
1:40.6	about what ought to be done. So it's hard to be really precise about what a gray area is, but most people know what I'm talking about. They've been in them.
1:49.0	Yes, yes. Well, and you have a great line in the book that I think helps sort of speak to the type of problem and the general approach
1:56.6	Which is when you face a gray area problem at work you should work through it as a manager and resolve it as a human being.
	...

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