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.

决策是从可供挑选的行动方向中作选择。决策的目的是建立并实现一个机构的目的和目标。之所以要决策是因为有问题存在，目标或目的的不适当，或者有某种东西妨碍了目标或目的的实现。

因此，决策过程对于管理非常重要。一个管理者做的差不多所有事情都离不开决策。有人甚至提出管理就是决策。虽然管理者不能预见未来，但是他们要做的很多决策需要他们考虑将来可能发生的情况。管理者常常必须对未来的情况作出最佳的猜测，使偶然性尽可能少地发生。但是因为总是在不确定的因素，所以决策往往伴随着风险。一个不当的决策的后果有时不严重而有时严重。

选择就是从多个选项中进行挑选的机会。没有选择就没有决策。决策本身就是一个选择的过程。很多决策有很宽的选择范围。例如，一个学生为了自己获得学位的志向，可以在许多不同的课程里作选择。对管理者来说，每一个决策都受着政策、程序、法律、先例等方面的制约。这些制约在一个机构的各个阶层都存在。

选择项就是可供选择、可能的行动方向；没有选择项，就没有选择，也就没有了决策。如果看不到有不同的选择项，说明对问题还没有进行全面的研究。一些管理者有时用非此即彼的方式处理问题，这虽然是他们简化复杂问题的方法，但是习惯了简化常使他们看不到别的解决办法。

在管理这个层次上，决策包括识别选择项和减少选择项两个步骤；其范围可以从极为有限的几个选择项到几乎无限多的选择项。

决策者必须有办法能从多种选择里确定一种为最佳，也就是说哪个对实现机构目标帮助最大，机构的目标也就是此机构所寻求的事态的结果。如何实现目标，个人和组织都有不同的看法。因此，最佳选择可能就取决于决策人了。通常一个组织内的单位或部门作出的决策可能有利于本部门、本单位，但对比它们大的机构来说就不是最佳选择了。这就是所谓的局部优化：增加对一单位或部门的便利同时减少对另一个单位或部门的便利，这是在两利不能兼顾的情况下所做的取舍。例如，经理可以把增加广告预算的必要性讲得头头是道，但是从总的布局看，增加改进产品的科研费用也许对这个组织更有好处。

因为一个组织希望同时达到的目标很多，所以就要进行权衡，虽然有些目标比另一些重要，但重要程度和次序则常常因人而异，因部门而异。管理者不同对同一问题所做的解说也是不同的。把同样一种情况摆在他们面前，销售经理看的是销售问题，生产经理看的是生产问题，如此等等。

多个目标的排序和重要性在某种程度上是以决策者的价值观为依据的。这些价值观念是个性的，很难捉摸，甚至抱有这种观念的人自己也很难弄清楚；这是因为价值观不断变化，也很复杂。很多商业活动中，不同的人对于风险和收益的可接受程度的价值观不一样，这就导致了他们对决策正确与否的看法也不同。

人们常以为决策是一个孤立的现象，但从系统的观念看，问题的产生有多种原因，所以决策既有意料中的结果，又有意料外的结果。一个组织是一个发展的实体，所以今天所做的决策对未来可能产生意义深远的影响。因此一个老练的管理者常要考虑当前决策在将来产生的结果。