How To Turn Executives Into Wizards

A Good Sounding Board Busts Stress and Boosts Success   Managing the future is a challenge even in the most stable of conditions. Many decisions, in retrospect, often prove to be shots in the dark despite the use of sophisticated forecasting tools and enormous data.   Wharton Professor Philip Tetlock wrote a magnum opus of the book ‘Superforecasting’ after 20 years of research. He says that “the average expert was only slightly better at predicting the future than a layperson using random guesswork”.   Difficulties in predicting the future and making ‘sound’ decisions have become a nightmarish prospect in the new business environment because of (i) the mindboggling complexities of new products and processes (ii)the dramatic changes in the external environment (iii) the high rate of obsolescence, and (iv) the enormous amounts of investments.   On such shifting sands, even a person with steely nerves would be beset by doubt and lose balance when making decisions. The f...

We made a few laconic statements in the last blog: “The crisis (of the effectiveness of training programmes) has reached such monumental proportions because of the basic and fundamental conceptual blunders of ‘wise and expert thinkers’. They ignored the radical change in the environment (in both, academic and industrial milieus). The fact is that futuristic, visionary, charismatic and transformational types of leaders cannot be trained, developed, made, created, shaped, moulded or ‘minted’. It is true that such leaders are not born. They are the ones who get fired up by their own, all-consuming passions, are ready to leave their comfort zones, take risks and make sacrifices to ‘BECOME’ effective leaders . They (the leaders) would, no doubt, need a supportive environment to thrive. The specifics of that will be covered in the next part.” In this post, we try to outline a few steps to resolve the crisis by suggesting radical changes. But then, the task is enormous and the apathy and iner...