Despite the historical tendency for businesses to slow spending and weigh investment decisions more carefully during a recession, our study finds that business decision-making is actually accelerating. Nearly one-half of all survey respondents say decision-making has quickened slightly or significantly increased over the past 12 months, while only some say it has slowed slightly or considerably. Such a dichotomy is the case at Book handles Group Nederland the largest book retailer in the Netherlands with more than 40 stores, 700 employees and around US$273m in revenue in 2008. Although recessionary pressures have made the firm more deliberate in its decision-making, “we have had to become faster because of competition and time-to-market pressure,” says Angelique Wouters, the company’s chief digital officer. At the same time, companies’ decision-making processes have grown more centralized, defying the perception that faster decision-making stems from flatter, more decentralized organizational charts. Over the past 12 months, decision-making has become more centralized in the C-suite, according to the respondents; while only a few agree that it has shifted to business units. Asked how they expect the decision-making process to evolve over the next 12 months, the largest proportion of respondents say it will become even more centralized within the C-suite. Only some of firms, significant business decisions are made mostly by C-suite executives. “We are absolutely centralizing our decision-making processes,” says Ms. Wouters, adding that in a recession investments and other decisions are scrutinized. Decision making get harder and harder as people get older. More carefully by senior management and greater emphasis is placed on projects that provide benefits across the enterprise rather than individual units. BGN’s addition of Ms. Wouters into the firm’s four-person executive board is a part of a broad restructuring to centralize decision-making. The move is both enabled by and a response to “the digitization of everything,” she says, “whether it’s our core business processes, our systems or our governance.” Among the important decisions taken at the board level was the move to rebrand its once loosely coupled network of local retail stores under the Selleys name and roll out its web-based “Smart Store” kiosks throughout the chain. More recently, the company has decided to consolidate management, previously decentralized to 15 geographical regions, into its four key market segments—consumer, business, education and digital. It was an integrated team of senior management at Tata Motors that last year
