About Us
40+ Years of SDG
Celebrating 40 years of creating value through better decisions.
SDG is committed to providing strategic counsel to help companies across the globe make better business decisions from the top of the organization to the front lines. This commitment starts within our own walls, where we cultivate an environment of support, encouragement, and lifelong learning. Throughout the last 40 years, we have helped more than 800 organizations strengthen their businesses through insight and analytical rigor, resulting in unbiased business decisions. Explore 40 years of industry impact below.
SDG's Global Footprint
SDG has worked in 57 countries on every continent except Antarctica. With staff and clients across the globe, we’ve helped facilitate change, foster economic growth, and educate client teams on better decision making.
Innovation, Insights, Impact.
Innovation: The Evolution of SDG
When we work with clients, we aren’t just solving a problem – we are helping organizations develop strategies and make changes to the way they address challenges so that every project has a lasting impact.
Insight: Educating the World
Many consulting organizations are talking about decision making now. But SDG has been pioneering this field for 40 years. We developed and adapted the process to make sure decision makers and organizations get the most of what they value – as defined by customers, employees, shareholders, and society – and learn the best practices for making value-creating decisions in the future.
Impact: Projects That Matter
When we collaborate with clients, it's more than just resolving an issue – we're aiding organizations in crafting strategies and implementing changes to tackle challenges in a manner that ensures each project leaves a lasting impact.
The Evolution of SDG
In 1964, after helping a bunch of nuclear engineers at General Electric figure out whether they should add a superheater to a new reactor, engineering professor Ronald Howard sat down to analyze what he’d just done. “Decision analysis,” he called it, and described it as “a logical procedure for the balancing of the factors that influence a decision” that factored in “uncertainties, values, and preferences.”
SDG founders Ron Howard, Carl Spetzler, Jim Matheson, having worked together at Stanford and in the decision analysis group at the Stanford Research Institute, join with a fourth co-founder, Jeff Foran, to form Strategic Decisions Group. The founders set out to create a new kind of management consulting firm—one that would harness the power of normative and behavioral decision analysis to help organizations choose the best course of action in the face of uncertainty, complexity, competing preferences, and organizational complexity.
During the savings & loan crisis, SDG played a pivotal role in analyzing and structuring distressed asset portfolios. Mellon Bank was the first to use the so-called “good bank/bad bank” strategy, transferring lower quality, distressed real estate-backed assets into a newly created liquidating bank (the “bad bank”). SDG went on to analyze other large portfolios of distressed assets, provide fairness opinions, and conduct risk analyses during this period.
SDG defines “Decision Quality” as the integration of decision analysis, behavioral science and the shareholder value movement. Ron Howard, at this point still at Stanford and SDG’s chairman, publishes a journal article that contains the first reference to “decision quality” in this context, "Decision Analysis: Practice and Promise." “Spreadsheet, decision tree, and influence diagram programs speed evaluation. Intelligent decision systems realized in computers offer promise of providing the benefits of decision analysis on a broader scale than ever before,” the author writes. “Decision analysis is now poised for a breakthrough in its usefulness to human beings.”
“How SmithKline Beecham Makes Better Resource Allocation Decisions” was published in Harvard Business Review. This publication became the blueprint for how pharma companies managed their portfolios for the next 20 years.
SDG publishes The Smart Organization: Creating Value through Strategic R&D. SDG co-founder Jim Matheson and SDG partner David Matheson identify the key practices that enable successful organizations to deliver a stream of winning products and services, drawing on the experiences of R&D-intensive organizations around the world.
SDG publishes Business Portfolio Management: Valuation, Risk Assessment, and EVA® Strategies by SDG partner Michael S. Allen. Published in response to two important business trends: increasing corporate acquisitions and managing business units as individual companies with a synergistic relationship to the parent company. Illustrated with detailed examples drawn from SDG’s extensive corporate portfolio engagements. This book triggered a series of value-creating portfolio engagements at SDG.
A small team of SDG partners form the Decision Education Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to improving the decision skills of young people. For several years, SDG incubated the foundation with office space and support, and many SDG staff members have volunteered in support of the foundation’s mission.
SDG introduces decision quality into governance processes and the board room in response to the governance failures that led to Sarbanes-Oxley.
SDG partners Carl Spetzler, Hannah Winter, and Jennifer Meyer publish Decision Quality: Value Creation from Better Business Decisions. This bestselling book describes not only how to ensure quality in every decision, but also illustrates how organizations build quality into their decision processes.
As decision makers seek to navigate multiple, sometimes conflicting value measures among parties with vastly different perspectives, SDG incorporates multi-attribute utility theory into client engagements. The ability to see in real time how preferences translate to decision choices is a game-changing perspective.
SDG continues to evolve with our clients by anticipating and addressing challenges and opportunities that will come from ever changing markets. Today, SDG increasingly supports clients as they incorporate ESG (environmental, social, and governance) factors into their decision making. More and more, investors, and consequently, corporate decision makers, are applying these non-financial factors into their analyses and decision processes as they explore strategic opportunities.