This morning I listened to Li Nannan's "How to Make Entrepreneurial Decisions" on Dedao Headlines, which mentioned that "entrepreneurs don't seek solutions within favorable conditions—they change the constraints themselves."
This corresponds to what Liu Run from Five-Minute Business School said: "Ordinary people change results, excellent people change causes, and top experts change models." Those who truly influence outcomes are the ones who change the model and transform the constraints.
The discussion outlined three types of decisions:
First Type of Decision: Personal Experience Decision System
Although the situation is new, the decision-maker has experienced something similar before. In this case, you activate your "personal experience decision system," and you can execute the decision as long as you feel confident about it.
For example, producing different online courses—while the content varies, if you've had course-production experience, you can estimate how many people and how much time you need to allocate, and complete the questionnaires, fundraising, filming, and launch before the deadline.
Second Type of Decision: Management Decision System
The situation is new, and while your personal experience is limited, you can leverage the team's strength to analyze it. In this case, you activate the "management decision system"—establishing a team with professional divisions to analyze the decision.
For example, a company deciding whether to invest in a new project needs financial, legal, and business analysis, and possibly environmental assessments and consumer surveys. It synthesizes expert opinions to determine how many resources to allocate.
Third Type of Decision: Entrepreneurial Decision System
This is the most difficult scenario—the situation exceeds not only your personal experience but everyone's experience. This requires the "entrepreneurial decision system." The core of entrepreneurial decision-making lies in recognizing "long-term value." Simply put: if I believe this has value, I'll do it.
Long-term value depends on your personal insights into the market and industry, plus your assessment of whether the decision will generate lasting benefits—not short-term gains. This heavily relies on the entrepreneur's thinking system, decisiveness, and execution ability.
For instance, in 2005 when Apple approached Intel to produce chips, Intel's management decision system assessed the risks, costs, and projected shipment volumes and concluded that Apple's phone project would be unprofitable. However, Samsung's decision-making chain was much shorter; they believed it was worth doing. When the iPhone launched, sales exceeded Intel's estimates by 100 times, and Samsung profited enormously.
However, the article also notes at the end that truly blockbuster products have no patterns, because they exceed everyone's experience and cannot be predicted.
