Few thinkers can speak about global governance with as much authority as Kishore Mahbubani. A former President of the United Nations Security Council, Permanent Secretary of Singapore’s Foreign Ministry and Dean of the renowned Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, he has been named “the muse of the Asian century”. In his latest book, due next year, Mahbubani plans to tackle the rising tensions between the US and China. As he explains, the US should embrace a more minimalist and strategic approach to foreign policy to maximize its interests in an era of Asian dominance.
Daniel Kahneman Interview: Less-Than-Rational Actors
Before Daniel Kahneman, few if any psychologists influenced the field of economics. But the Nobel laureate reversed the assumption underpinning most economic theories: people always make rational choices. “People are rational, except they are myopic,” says Kahneman. As a result of his work, which pioneered the ideas of behavioral economics, individuals learned how to modify their less-than-perfect decisions and organizations learned to take human limitations into consideration in decision-making. In this interview, Kahneman talks about the history of his research, how he, who began as a psychologist, ended up influencing economics, and why his work generated so much impact.
Clayton Christensen on Innovation: Finding the Jobs to Be Done
“Innovation” is difficult, yet the word itself is so overly used that the meaning of it has become hollow. Some people consider being “innovative” as being “lucky.” Yet for Clay Christensen, a business professor at Harvard, innovation is about finding the “jobs that need to be done” in our lives. In this interview with CKGSB Knowledge, he argues that companies should not take the task as akin to gambling. Instead, companies should adopt a more focused, process-oriented approach of finding the “jobs” that customers need to do in their lives, and then create products that make those jobs easier.
Talent Management, an Interview with Edward E. Lawler III
Business has changed, specifically the relationship between management and employees. Once upon a time, companies offered careers—long-term, stable employment wherein the employee filled a narrowly-defined role. In past generations, it was common to spend an entire working lifetime at a single company, but now most millennials are ‘less loyal’ to employers, they go where their talents are valued. Edward E. Lawler III, Distinguished Professor of Business at the University of Southern California, expounds on the new model, which he terms “talent management”, a new paradigm focuses on the critical needs of a business, and finding the right people that can fulfill them.
Roger Martin on the Lost Art of Strategy
Companies today are less enthusiastic about corporate strategy. Strategy as a way of thinking has become “a lost discipline”, as phrased by Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and where he still teaches. In this interview, he points out that having an “emergent strategy” does not mean “don’t have a strategy” and we should get away from strategy as planning. He also explains “integrative thinking” and “design thinking” and how to use them in daily lives and help decision-making.
Dan Ariely’s Advice for Decision Making: Understanding our Minds
We make decisions every day. Most of them are small: Should I buy that shirt? Others demand more thought: Is marriage right for me? The common thread running between all of them is that we are unequipped to make sense of any of it. The world in which the human race came of age—one of ferocious predators and unforgiving nature—is no longer the world we live in. For the risks we face now, we are out of date. Dan Ariely, author of bestsellers like Predictably Irrational, has built a career mapping the peculiarities of our innermost decision-making foibles, and offers insight in guarding against them.
Sydney Finkelstein And The Superboss Playbook
Throughout our careers, we encounter a range of management styles, with mixed results. But what is it that distinguishes a regular boss from a truly great boss? Why is it that some help us to reach new heights, while others make us feel constrained? These are deceptively simple questions with many complex answers, the latest of which comes from Sydney Finkelstein. In his new book Superbosses, Finkelstein takes as his guide figures from disparate industries, including jazz musician Miles Davis and newspaper editor Gene Roberts, and examines the traits of those who have spawned extensive networks of talent, the titular superbosses, and ultimately brought greater success to themselves.
Henry Mintzberg on Rebalancing Society
Henry Mintzberg was once called the enfant terrible of management thinking. It’s not hard to see why. The author of books like The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning and Strategy Safari, Mintzberg has always put forth radical ideas that sometimes rub people the wrong way: he wrote Managers Not MBAs, a scathing critique of business schools and MBA programs, while working at a business school. More recently, Mintzberg has trained his guns on an unlikely topic: society and politics. His latest book, Rebalancing Society, talks about how dangerous the lack of balance between the public, private and the plural sector (civil society) really is.
Rachel Botsman on the Collaborative Economy
The sharing economy has gone from being a niche idea most familiar to Silicon Valley insiders to one that has reshaped our lives—you’d be hard pressed to find a city dweller who hasn’t at least taken an Uber or stayed in an Airbnb. But for all that expansion, the ideas underpinning it are not so well understood, a fact routinely demonstrated in the often fraught debates concerning what the sharing economy means for workers’ rights, traditional incumbents and the role of regulation. Rachel Botsman, co-author of What’s Mine is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live, explains the intricacies of this still nascent phenomenon.
Francesca Gino on How to Not Get Sidetracked
Sometimes the biggest obstacle that stands between you and your goal is your wayward mind. You often start something new, but end up not finishing it. Think of the number of times you took a gym membership. Or vowed to eat healthy. Or decided on a career choice. What happened? So why do we deviate from our well-chosen and well-thought out goals? Francesca Gino, a behavioral scientist and the author of Sidetracked, researched this problem and found the psychological drivers behind our inability to stick to a plan of action. In this interview, she suggests ways to identify these drivers—and combat them.
Follow us