A friend who teaches at a business school asked me for recommended resources on decision-making from a Christian perspective. Here was my response:
Proverbs! Might be the best business book if you consider how relevant it remains after 3000 years.
I’m not aware of a book on decision-making which is explicitly Christian. Most resources on decision-making stress rational thinking, which of course is a Western (Athens + Jerusalem) idea. Most, like the excellent recent book “Clear Thinking” by Shane Parrish, articulate how human emotion and natural psychology affect our ability to make rational decisions. Where many fail, in my view, is that we can’t completely separate our emotions from our rationale thinking process, any more than we can separate our mind from our body.
There are learnable disciplines about how to structure information to make better decisions. Those are worthwhile. We study ourselves and learn where we have tendencies that get in the way of the best decisions.
The Christian worldview reinforces the “Why” and “What we optimize for” questions. Decisions are always about tradeoffs, and it’s your worldview that shapes how you weight the tradeoffs. If you only optimize for financial short-term, you’ll run your business into ruin and hurt people. The Christian worldview does not treat employees as soul-less slaves and lesser beings, and honors the value of work. If you only optimize for making employees comfy, or to be everything to every customer, your business won’t go the distance. Efficiency and effectiveness are both important, in different parts of a business, and can vary over time. It’s possible to do sales and marketing in deceitful and manipulative ways, or with integrity. Business leaders have made many foolish decisions in trying to appear to be ‘righteous’ rather than committing to a tough course of action (e.g., spending cuts). It might help your students to explain that top executives spend very little time reading the ‘latest’ business books. They know what they need is in spiritual texts, biographies, history, and philosophy. My own view, today, is that the present crisis of meaning is creating the opportunity for religious people to lead and develop organizations, especially businesses.
