Child's play will sort out airport fiasco

Ground Floor: The question I'm most commonly asked when it comes to my current career is: "Where do you get your ideas from?" It's probably the hardest question to answer because, the truth is, I'm not sure where they come from.

Sometimes a plot arrives in my head, fully formed. Other times, a niggling interest in a subject might get me thinking about how it might pan out in fiction. When I think too hard about it, I come up with no ideas at all, while sometimes, ideas compete with each other in my head and I wrestle with which might end up working better on paper.

Making decisions about what plot to go with is an intuitive thing, but decision-making in business is usually different.

Intuition plays a part, but there's an army of consultants out there to tell you the best way to evaluate the problem and to come to the right conclusion.

They all start with a very basic instruction, which is to identify the issue to be addressed or the purpose of your decision. Then you should gather information about the problem to help you understand the nature of the decision you must make.

You should then look at the range of options available to you and evaluate those options based on their possible outcomes. Having done this, you should be able to decide on the best option. After making the decision, you evaluate it and try to learn from it. You should ask yourself whether or not you would make the same decision again and assess whether or not the decision you made resulted in the outcome you hoped for.

Alternatively, you could do like Takashi Hashiyama, president of the Maspro Denkoh Corporation, a Japanese electronics company.

Hashiyama's decision-making process was my favourite story of last week and resulted in Christie's auction house winning the business to sell the company's art collection, which was valued in excess of $20 million (€15.6 million).

There's no information available on why Maspro Denkoh decided to offload its collection, although it might have been influenced by the fact that the one-year return on Maspro Denkoh is currently -5.256 per cent and the coffers need replenishing. The collection, included paintings by Cézanne, Picasso and Van Gogh - you may remember that many Japanese companies invested in art during the 1980s and had something of a rollercoaster ride as a result.

Hashiyama decided to get rid of the paintings, presumably using these criteria. His next decision was how to choose the auction house to sell them.

The choice was between Christie's and Sotheby's. Abandoning all of the means of decision that we expect from corporate leaders, Hashiyama elected to make the two companies compete against each other in a game of Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) - and the winner would get the contract.

For those of you who think this is a game suited to the schoolyard, you should ask Lee Rammage for his views. Lee is the RPS world champion, a title he won at the World Championships in Toronto, Canada last year. Kanae Ishibashi, head of Christie's in Japan, didn't say whether she spoke to Lee about his strategies, but she did some research on the game before the competition started. There are many gambits in RPS - the crescendo (paper, scissors, rock), the avalanche (rock, rock, rock) and the fistful o'dollars (rock, paper, paper).

But Christie's strategy was to start with scissors which, according to the daughters of the international director, is a safe opening move. According to the 11-year-old twins, Flora and Alice, most novices anticipate their opponents going for rock, because it "feels" strongest. Therefore, they'll choose paper which beats rock, which means you should choose scissors.

The girls were right. Sotheby's went for paper. Bang went the estimated $2.5 million in fees. Christie's made $142.9 million in their impressionist and modern art auction, $52 million more than the previous night's total at Sotheby's. It's hard to know whether or not Sotheby's would have achieved more than the $11.7 million realised for Cézanne's Les grands arbes au Jas de Bouffan, which had been estimated to reach between $12 and $16 million, but it was still a good result for Christie's. Hashiyama has his money and hopefully the girls were rewarded for their strategy.

Which all leads me to think that perhaps this is the way out of the Dublin airport debacle.

This ridiculous state of affairs has turned into a battle of ideologies, in which the consumer is losing out. Reminiscent of the old adage that you wait all day for a bus and then three come together, the latest proposal is for a third terminal at the airport to assuage the desire for the PDs to have competition.

But the flip side of this is the issue of union power and the Taoiseach's unwillingness to crack the whip in north Dublin. The provision of basic, decent facilities is not one that should have become a political football, and the inability of the Government to make a rational and, above all, consumer-led decision on the running of any terminal is appalling.

Private enterprise may not always get the job done, and employers in the private sector may not always make the right decisions, but at least they make them quickly. The idea that this has been rattling round for years with nothing being done is ludicrous. Which is why Bertie, Mary and the unions should agree that the quickest, simplest way to agree on how many terminals are built and who runs them should be by playing RPS.

The rules and code of conduct are available on the RPS website, www.worldrps.com and the whole thing could be supervised by independent observers. We might not get the best decision, but at least we'd get one!