Join Dr. Jacoby for classes in Southern Calfornia:

The Decisive Manager offered through UCLA Extension's Technical Management Program. This ten-hour class is one of the courses you may choose as part of the one-week Technical Management Program, UCLA, Los Angeles, California, March 23 - 27, 2009. See below for more information.

Free introductory talk:

Decisiveness...and How to Get It, a 20-minute talk that will inspire you to be decisive and suggest tools that will help you move ahead with confidence. This talk is presented free of charge to qualified businesses and organizations in Los Angeles and Orange counties. Contact us to schedule it for your team.

Classes customized for your organization:

These courses are taught at your facility and customized to your needs. Contact us for more information.

Experiential Systems Engineering, UCLA Extension. In this intensive eight-month course, students work in teams on realistic systems engineering problems. The full-day monthly class meetings combine review, feedback, and lively instruction in the techniques they will need for the next phase. The three instructors provide a broad and balanced view of the systems engineering discipline and are available between class meetings for questions and assistance. The students leave the class with a rich example of end-to-end systems engineering, and powerful methods for systems engineering, teamwork, and presentations.

The Decisive Manager, UCLA Extension. Whether designing a system or managing a project, you need to make fast, confident, and balanced decisions. You are faced with many important, and often conflicting, objectives. Trade-offs must be made at every level. This course provides several powerful techniques to help you understand and prioritize the various criteria, develop and compare alternatives, and make a smart, defensible choice. You learn analytical techniques for visualizing and comparing alternatives and possible outcomes, and the use of Monte Carlo techniques to estimate and plan for risk. You gain a clear understanding of the decision-making process through interactive demonstrations and hands-on exercises applied to realistic case studies. You leave the course with many simple yet powerful tools you can immediately apply at your workplace, along with ready-to-use spreadsheets to handle the calculations for you.

"This course was more than I expected. The material can be used right away to validate decisions or help make them."
—Sam Cortez, Director of IT, Symantec

Simple Spreadsheets for Hard Decisions. Learn simple, yet powerful, techniques to make decisions using Microsoft Excel, even if you've never used it before. Be decisive even in the face of uncertainty, vague issues, competing goals, and risks. Everyday decisions form the basis for the examples. You will leave the class with extensive hands-on experience and a collection of ready-to-use decision spreadsheets.