How To Turn Executives Into Wizards

"Teaching is the one profession that creates all the other professions" - Anonymous  ___________ (Note: This is a sequel to our blog of July 2021 titled "Rewiring of the Brain is a Must When Rapid Change Leads to Reality Jumping Ahead of Fantasy”) _____________ “Hi Krishna! What a surprise! You are a metamorphosed Indian, almost Yankee,” said Krishna’s bosom friend Ram. “Looks like your team’s visit to the USA was a grand success.”   “At a personal level, yes,” Krishna said. “You remember before leaving for the US trip, I was so very diffident and wanted to drop out of the team because the mission was full of new technologies that had baffled me. But thanks to your transformational ‘sermon’ on the concept of 'rewiring of the brain' by perusing wider topics, expanding my network and considering myself a ‘student for life’, my mindset changed completely. I started learning about new topics with resources on the internet and also built up friendly relations with the...

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...