Rotman Management Winter 2014

MOST OF OUR READERS ARE AWARE that the Rotman School’s goal is to train creative problem solvers who can tackle today’s most complex problems, and that this focus is shared by our magazine. As a result, this issue is the third in a series: we published Thinking about Thinking in Winter 2008, and Thinking about Thinking II in Winter 2011. With this issue, we pick up the mantle once again in an effort to provide you with the very latest tools and methods to help you develop into a world-class thinker and problem solver. We could have called this ‘The Metacognition Issue’, but the term might have scared some people off. While it sounds lofty, metacognition simply means ‘thinking about thinking’, and our ability to do this is one of the…

IN THE EFFECTIVE EXECUTIVE, Peter Drucker writes at length about decision making, arguing that it is a central executive task. An effective decision-maker, he says, focuses on the most important decisions, works to achieve deep conceptual understanding and isn’t overly impressed by speed. But Drucker also points to a particular idiosyncrasy of effective decision-makers: “The understanding that underlies the right decision grows out of the clash of divergent opinions and out of serious consideration of the competing alternatives.” Effective decision makers, Drucker says, disregard conventional wisdom about reaching consensus and instead work to create disagreement and dissention. As an example, he points to the man who turned General Motors into the largest company in the world: “Alfred Sloan is reported to have said at a meeting of one of his top committees:…

You can get everything else right, but if you fail to drive peoples’ emotions in the right direction, nothing will work as well as it could. Your latest book is about a skill that you call “the hidden driver of excellence”. Tell us about it. My new book is about the power of focus, and the brain systems involved in training our attention. I argue that leaders need to be adept at three varieties of focus. The first is self-awareness, and as a result of that, the ability to manage your own emotions; the second is awareness of other people; and the third is an outer focus, whether it’s an awareness of your organization as a whole or a larger sense of the broader systems that affect your industry. The largest possible…

We go through day-to-day life on cruise control, oblivious to huge swaths of our surroundings.Figuring out what people actually need leads to the most significant innovations. WHEN YOU HEAR THE WORD ‘CREATIVITY’, what do you think of next? If you are like many people, your mind immediately leaps to artistic endeavours like sculpture, drawing, music or dance. You may believe that architects and designers are paid to be creative thinkers, but CEOs, lawyers and doctors are not. Or you may feel that being creative is a fixed trait, like having brown eyes — either you’re born with creative genes or you’re not. As brothers who have worked together for 30 years at the forefront of innovation, we have come to see this set of misconceptions as ‘the creativity myth.’ Our latest book…

ROB MCEWEN HAD A PROBLEM. The chairman and CEO of Canadian mining group Goldcorp knew that its Red Lake site could be a money-spinner — a mine nearby was thriving; but no one could figure out where to find high-grade ore. The terrain was inaccessible, operating costs were high, and the unionized staff had already gone on strike. In short, McEwen was lumbered with a gold mine that wasn’t a gold mine. Then, inspiration struck. Attending a conference about recent developments in IT, McEwen was smitten with the opensource revolution. Bucking fierce internal resistance, he created The Goldcorp Challenge: the company put Red Lake’s closelyguarded topographic data online and offered $575,000 in prize money to anyone who could identify rich drill sites. To the astonishment of players in the mining sector,…

HAVE YOU BEEN ‘NUDGED’ to behave in a more socially-or economically-sustainable way lately? While you might not realize it, you probably have. Drawing on findings from Behavioural Economics, University of Chicago Professors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein first introduced the notion of ‘nudging’ in their 2008 best-seller, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. A nudge, they taught us, is any aspect of the ‘choice architecture’ that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way, without removing any options or significantly changing economic consequences. For example, consider two school cafeterias that want to help students consume less junk food. The first one decides to attack the problem by placing a ‘tax’ on burgers and French fries and banning the sale of desserts altogether. The second cafeteria takes an alternate route, adjusting…