Critical Thinking in Business

Critical Thinking in Business

Critical thinking is a vital component to effective decision making in a business or professional setting. The ability to critically think and decipher between an emotional decision and a rational or objective decision is key to running a successful business and maintaining trusting relationships. Critical thinking is often a skill set versus an innate behavior. Since this type of thinking is a skill set, continued development is necessary to reach a high level of critical thinking especially in a professional setting. (Bateman & Snell, 2007)

Critical thinking can be defined as "the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action" (Scriven & Paul, p3). In reality, critical thinking is a process that removes fact from fiction and analyzes potential outcomes of different potential decisions. For a business, fact based decisions maintain a company's reputation and integrity.

At US Cellular, critical thinking is a necessary competency for a leadership role. Many decisions including deciding what sponsorships to invest our money into are complex issues that requires careful analysis and foresight to consider potential outcomes of what sponsorships are chosen. In 2010, a decision had to be made on our sports sponsorships. From a budget standpoint, we could only invest in one of the sponsorships and needed that sponsorship to provide us with as much positive exposure in the community as possible. Our group set up meetings with the sports divisions of each school to have them present what they could offer US Cellular and at what cost.

The first school, sponsor "A" presented our team with a PowerPoint presentation and full color book to review the offerings. These offerings included television spots with advertising during football games, banners during the homecoming games, and a series of tickets that would be provided to each game. The most enticing offer was exclusivity from all other wireless carriers that sponsor "A" stated they would provide during the presentation. All the advertising that sponsor "A" presented was exactly what US Cellular was looking for.

We were almost sold on sponsor "A" before our group had met with sponsor "B". Sponsor "B" presented to our leadership group a week later and had less than desirable offerings than the previous school. We would get advertising through radio spots during football games, tickets to only the home games, and one banner could be used at all of the home games. Exclusivity from all other wireless carriers was available but would cost more than the previous school. Our US Cellular leadership team walked out of our second meeting with our case closed decision made on sponsorship "A", and then I remembered