The Decision Strategist

The month of September is over and I didn’t even realize it! It was a roller-coaster of a month, with some serious highs and some not so exciting lows. There were 38 posts and 23 comments this month. This is double the number of comments from August, and shows that more people are taking interest, which is good.

I’m at a bit of a crossroads with The Decision Strategist. I am in the process of evaluating different topics and ideas to gauge both my interest and my reader’s interest. Part of the difficulty of being a young blog is establishing content and topics that are interesting enough to provide a lot of material without writing yourself into a corner of writing only about superficial content (unless that is your topic of course).

I’ve tried to stay away from the typical strategy of commenting on news and posts in other blogs as I’d like articles here to be as original as possible. I still think this is the right approach, but I also need to consider what you all would like to read about. To that end, if you’d like to give me some feedback, either by leaving a comment or by contacting me, please let me know what topics you’ve found interesting and what you would like me to write about more often.

My crazy article on strategy in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress was linked to by J. Orlin Grabbe, who runs a strange and interesting site with a lot of…I’m not really sure. That link generated over 300 visitors, almost none of who stuck around. Still, it was a pleasant surprise to wake up and see the high number of visitors.

Other than that monstrously popular (by my standards) post, people seemed most interested in these posts:

• 9 Ways to Compete Against Big Business. I really liked this post, it was interesting and different from other lists on the same topic. I should try to expand and apply lessons from decision making errors to other situations.
• SWOT Analysis for Personal Goals. I’d never done a SWOT analysis before, but the exercise was useful. I talked about some of the drawbacks as well, which I think was good for me to keep in mind while doing the analysis.

The third spot is occupied by close ratings between Motivate Your Employees by Valuing Creativity Over Success, Strategic Communication when Quitting and Using Creative Problem Solving to Make Work More Exciting.

I’ve also finally found some other interesting blogs that are related to decision making, among them:

• The Thinker. Excellent and interesting thoughts on human behavior as it applies to current events and issues. Covers things like global warming costs and perceptions, education and expert behavior and cognitive dissonance.
• Overcoming Bias. A great blog with many contributors from the University of Oxford. Tends to focus on a wide variety of topics all related to biases in decision making and other behavior.
• The Situationist. Focused on the idea that human behavior is less about the individual and more about the situation. It’s an intriguing thesis and the content is very good.
• Analyzing Decisions. A blog about specific ways in which cognitive behaviors affect our decision making. It tends to be a bit infrequent, but usually posts good information.
• Deception Blog. A focus on ways in which we deceive including a variety of psychological and cognitive behaviors that affect how we make decisions. Generally more science oriented.

Oh yeah, and I made $5.03 in September.

I’ve also received some tracebacks from sites that copy my article exactly with a reference. I guess I should be flattered?

Thanks to everyone for your comments and thoughts. I appreciate your feedback and support. And again, let me know what you think!

-zot.

Popularity: 10%

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 at 10:52 am and is filed under Decision Making.