A decision is a choice made from among alternative courses of action that are available. The purpose of making a decision is to establish and achieve organizational goals and objectives. The reason for making a decision is that a problem exists, goals or objectives are wrong, or something is standing in the way of accomplishing them.

Thus the decision-making process is fundamental to management. Almost everything a manager does involves decisions, indeed, some suggest that the management process is decision making. Although managers cannot predict the future, many of their decisions require that they consider possible future events. Often managers must make a best guess at that the future will be and try to leave as little as possible to chance, but since uncertainty is always there, risk accompanies decisions. Sometimes the consequences of a poor decision are slight; at other times they are serious.

Choice is the opportunity to select among alternatives. If there is no choice, there is no decision to be made. Decision making is the process of choosing, and many decisions have a broad range of choice. For example, a student may be able to choose among a number of different courses in order to implement the decision to obtain a college degree. Fox managers, every decision has constraints based on policies, procedures, laws, precedents, and the like. These constraints exist at all levels of the organization.

Alternatives are the possible courses of action from which choices can be made. If there are no alternatives, there is no choice and, therefore, no decision. If no alternatives are seen, often it means that a thorough job of examining the problems has not been done. For example, managers sometimes treat problems in an either/or fashion; this is their way of simplifying complex problems. But the tendency to simplify blinds them to other alternatives.

At the managerial level, decision making includes limiting alternatives as well as identifying them, and the range is from highly limited to practically unlimited.

Decision makers must have some way of determining which of several alternatives is best - that is, which contributes the most to the achievement of organizational goals. An organizational goal is an end or a state of affairs the organization seeks to reach. Because individuals (and organizations) frequently have different ideas about how to attain the goals, the best choice may depend on who makes the decision. Frequently, departments or units within an organization make decisions that are good for them individually but that are less than optimal for the larger organization. Called suboptimization, this is a trade-off that increases the advantages to one unit or function but decreases the advantages to another unit or function. For example, the marketing manager may argue effectively for an increased advertising budget. In the larger scheme of things, however, increased funding for research to improve the products might be more beneficial to the organization.

These trade-offs occur because there are many objectives that organizations wish to attain simultaneously. Some of these objectives are more important than others, but the order and degree of importance often vary from person to person and from department to department. Different managers define the same problem in different terms. When presented with a common case, sales managers tend to see sales problems, production managers see production problems, and so on.

The ordering and importance of multiple objectives is also based, in part, on the values of the decision maker. Such values are personal; they are hard to understand, even by the individual, because they are so dynamic and complex. In many business situations different people's values about acceptable degrees of risk and profitability cause disagreement about the correctness of decisions.

People often assume that a decision is an isolated phenomenon. But from a systems point of view, problems have multiple causes, and decisions have intended and unintended consequences. An organization is an ongoing entity, and a decision made today may have consequences far into the future. Thus the skilled manager looks toward the future consequences of current decisions.

決策是從可供挑選的行動方向中作選擇。決策的目的是建立并實現一個機構的目的和目標。之所以要決策是因為有問題存在，目標或目的的不適當，或者有某種東西妨礙了目標或目的的實現。

因此，決策過程對于管理非常重要。一個管理者做的差不多所有事情都離不開決策。有人甚至提出管理就是決策。雖然管理者不能預見未來，但是他們要做的很多決策需要他們考慮將來可能發生的情況。管理者常常必須對未來的情況作出最佳的猜測，使偶然性盡可能少地發生。但是因為總是在不確定的因素，所以決策往往伴隨著風險。一個不當的決策的后果有時不嚴重而有時嚴重。

選擇就是從多個選項中進行挑選的機會。沒有選擇就沒有決策。決策本身就是一個選擇的過程。很多決策有很寬的選擇范圍。例如，一個學生為了自己獲得學位的志向，可以在許多不同的課程里作選擇。對管理者來說，每一個決策都受著政策、程序、法律、先例等方面的制約。這些制約在一個機構的各個階層都存在。

選擇項就是可供選擇、可能的行動方向；沒有選擇項，就沒有選擇，也就沒有了決策。如果看不到有不同的選擇項，說明對問題還沒有進行全面的研究。一些管理者有時用非此即彼的方式處理問題，這雖然是他們簡化復雜問題的方法，但是習慣了簡化常使他們看不到別的解決辦法。

在管理這個層次上，決策包括識別選擇項和減少選擇項兩個步驟；其范圍可以從極為有限的幾個選擇項到幾乎無限多的選擇項。

決策者必須有辦法能從多種選擇里確定一種為最佳，也就是說哪個對實現機構目標幫助最大，機構的目標也就是此機構所尋求的事態的結果。如何實現目標，個人和組織都有不同的看法。因此，最佳選擇可能就取決于決策人了。通常一個組織內的單位或部門作出的決策可能有利于本部門、本單位，但對比它們大的機構來說就不是最佳選擇了。這就是所謂的局部優化：增加對一單位或部門的便利同時減少對另一個單位或部門的便利，這是在兩利不能兼顧的情況下所做的取舍。例如，經理可以把增加廣告預算的必要性講得頭頭是道，但是從總的布局看，增加改進產品的科研費用也許對這個組織更有好處。

因為一個組織希望同時達到的目標很多，所以就要進行權衡，雖然有些目標比另一些重要，但重要程度和次序則常常因人而異，因部門而異。管理者不同對同一問題所做的解說也是不同的。把同樣一種情況擺在他們面前，銷售經理看的是銷售問題，生產經理看的是生產問題，如此等等。

多個目標的排序和重要性在某種程度上是以決策者的價值觀為依據的。這些價值觀念是個性的，很難捉摸，甚至抱有這種觀念的人自己也很難弄清楚；這是因為價值觀不斷變化，也很復雜。很多商業活動中，不同的人對于風險和收益的可接受程度的價值觀不一樣，這就導致了他們對決策正確與否的看法也不同。

人們常以為決策是一個孤立的現象，但從系統的觀念看，問題的產生有多種原因，所以決策既有意料中的結果，又有意料外的結果。一個組織是一個發展的實體，所以今天所做的決策對未來可能產生意義深遠的影響。因此一個老練的管理者常要考慮當前決策在將來產生的結果。