Intentional Insights

Maximize the value that pessimists and optimists bring to your enterprise by helping them work together well. Optimists should generate half-baked ideas and give them to the pessimists, who would select the most viable notions and finish baking them into full-fledged plans.

To prevent disasters in transitioning to working from home, imagine that your transition completely failed. Then, brainstorm all plausible reasons for failure, and generate solutions to these potential problems. Do the same to maximize success.

To avoid decision disasters and defeat cognitive biases, develop the 12 critical skills that cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics show are needed for mental fitness.

Your relationships will be undermined or even destroyed by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, unless you take proactive steps right now to save them by treating our current conditions as the new normal.

Asking the 8 Powerful Questions during a pre-engagement stakeholder assessment will lead to better engagement and stronger relationships with your stakeholders.

Official guidelines for COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic preparation assume a wildly optimistic scenario due to dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases. You need to instead prepare for a realistic pessimistic scenario.

If you care about your bottom line, hire women over men. Due to gender discrimination, women had to work harder to get the same career position as men, and you will on average get a better worker if you hire a woman.

When it comes to shopping, men tend to take more risks, while women prefer to take their time to get the best possible deal. Both genders are prone to mistakes. However, you can train your mind to make the wisest shopping decisions this Valentine’s Day.

Effective strategic planning involves: 1) Identifying potential threats and opportunities; 2) Planning how to deal with them; 3) Reserving sufficient resources to address threats and opportunities; 4) Making your plans resilient and flexible.

The choice that feels most comfortable to your gut is often the worst decision for your bottom line. To be a truly wise decision maker, you have to adopt counterintuitive, uncomfortable, but highly profitable techniques to avoid business disasters by making the best decisions.