Glossary | | Chapter 1 | | Autonomous Action | Action taken by lower-level managers who, on their own initiative, formulate new strategies and work to persuade top-level managers to alter the strategic priorities of a company. | Business Unit | A self-contained division that provides a product or service for a particular market. | Cognitive Biases | Systematic errors in human decision making that arise from the way people process information. | Competitive Advantage | The advantage over rivals achieved when a company’s profitability is greater than the average profitability of all firms in its industry. | Devil’s Advocacy | A technique in which one member of a decision-making group acts as a devil’s advocate, bringing out all the considerations that might make the proposal unacceptable. | Dialectic Inquiry | The generation of a plan (a thesis) and a counterplan (an antithesis) that reflect plausible but conflicting courses of action. | Emergent Strategies | Strategies that “emerge” in the absence of planning. | Escalating Commitment | A cognitive bias that occurs when decision makers, having already committed significant resources to a project, commit even more resources after receiving feedback that the project is failing. | Functional Managers | Managers responsible for supervising a particular function—that is, a task, activity, or operation, like accounting, marketing, Research & Development, information technology, or logistics. | General Managers | Managers who bear responsibility for the overall performance of the company or for that of one of its major self-contained subunits or divisions. | Illusion of Control | A cognitive bias rooted in the tendency to overestimate one’s ability to control events. | Multidivisional Company | A company that competes in several different businesses and has created a