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In this chapter, it is demonstrated that the concepts of leadership and organization are closely linked. A leader should initially get to know the organizational culture as well as possible. Such a culture can for example be authoritarian and conformist or innovative and progressive in nature. The assumption is that leaders are influenced by their own culture. Strategic decisions are characterized by the fact that they are new, complex and open in nature, and being able to develop a strategy is one of the most difficult tasks for a leader. Traditionally, it is primarily the top leadership in an organization that works with strategic decisions, and thus it is common that strategic issues are handled by top leadership teams. This is related to the globalization of business and to the fact that the pace of work has increased significantly. In order to exercise leadership, a leader must have access to power. A power base can be created through networking as well as by using different political tactics. However, it is important to use political tactics in order to promote the organization's interests. When a leader has built up a power base, it is essential that power is used properly. The decisions that leaders make must be ethically correct and not violate universal human values. For instance, they should not lead to negative consequences for others within or outside the organization. Evidence suggests that most leaders have the potential to develop as ethical decision makers.

This chapter includes a discussion of leadership decisions and stress. Many leaders are daily exposed to stress when they must make decisions, and there are often social reasons for this. Social standards suggest that a leader must be proactive and make decisions and not flee the situation. Conflict often creates stress in decision-making situations. It is important for leaders to understand that it is not stress in itself that leads to bad decisions, rather, bad decisions may be the result of time pressure in the sense that leaders have not been able to gather enough relevant information. Thus, it is worthwhile for leaders to be able to prioritize properly in order to cope with stressful situations. In some situations, a leader chooses to delegate the decisions to his/her team and then it is important to guard against «groupthink», a phenomenon where members of a team put consensus before anything else as a result of the peer pressure. A number of methods are presented that enable leaders to avoid this phenomenon. Often leaders are involved in decision-making situations where they are forced to navigate between objectives that are in strong conflict with each other. We are talking about "decision dilemmas". These are characterized by the existence of a conflict between the top leadership's desire to control the activities and their wish to give autonomy and independence to the various units. It is important for leaders to be able to strike a balance in different dilemma situations and understand how to best manage conflicts when they arise.

1 An Overview: The Bureaucracy and the Plan -- The Foreign Trade Bureaucracies -- Foreign Trade Planning -- 2 The Party and the Government -- The Communist Party -- The National Government -- Motivations of the Political Leadership -- 3 The Central Planning Agencies -- The State Planning Committee (Gosplan) -- The State Committee for Material and Technical Supply (Gossnab) -- The State Committee for Science and Technology -- The Ministry of Finance and the State Bank -- The State Price Committee -- 4 The Foreign Trade and Industrial Ministries -- The Ministry of Foreign Trade -- The Industrial Ministries -- 5 Cost-Benefit Analysis for Foreign Trade -- Foreign Trade Efficiency Indices: A Brief History -- Efficiency Indices for Simple Commodity Trade -- Inadequacies of Domestic Prices -- Replacement of Prices with Full-Cost Indices -- Advantages of Wholesale Prices over Full-Cost Indices -- Special Problems of Import Valuation -- Efficiency Indices for Specialization Agreements -- Efficiency Indices for Credit Deliveries -- Efficiency Indices for Compensation Agreements -- Efficiency Indices for Trade in Licenses -- Practical Application of Efficiency Indices -- 6 Foreign Trade Optimization Models -- The Trzeciakowski Model -- Shagalov's Basic Model -- Dynamic Models -- Interregional Models -- Models of Socialist Economic Integration -- Branch Models -- 7 Empirical Analyses of Soviet Foreign Trade Decision Making -- The Commodity Structure of Soviet Foreign Trade -- The Traditional View -- Fundamental Comparative Advantage -- Cross-Sectional Commodity Studies -- 8 Summary and Conclusions -- Notes -- References.