Hi everyone My name is Sydney Finkelstein and this is of course number two in my specialization on strategic leadership, the art and science of making great decisions. I'm a professor at Dartmouth's tuck school of business? And I've been working with companies and leaders and coaching people for well for decades. And what I'm going to do in this course all around decision making is share with you many things I learned along the way from some pretty smart people, pretty talented people, but also some people that, stumble along the way. And learning from what went right and wrong I think is a great way for each of us to kind of up our game and get ready to try to be the best we possibly can at whatever it is we do for a living. So, the question really on the table to start is why do seemingly good leaders sometimes make bad decisions? I mean, it's quite a question, right? So for example, why are 100 year old newspapers or even multi century old newspapers going out of business? Why is that happening? And you know, the answer has a lot to do with digital technology as as we know, but why, why why did it happen? Why did they let this happen? Or totally different scenario? You remember hurricane Katrina, terrible gigantic hurricane that hit new Orleans in Louisiana in in general? Why was the federal government response to hurricane Katrina so slow? Why did that happen? Why do some people who are fully capable in other walks of life refused to believe in vaccines. Why do so many high net worth people really well off people, prestigious politicians, Statesmen, why do they believe so strongly in Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos, the biotech diagnostic company that had this idea of doing a little pinprick of your blood and then testing for 100 different potential diseases. And the company was worth $1.9 billion it's worth nothing. And Elizabeth Holmes, of course had a famous trial back in 2021 for her role in this. Why why do seemingly, smart people fall into these into these traps in in a nutshell, what the question really is? Why do some people think they're right when they are actually very, wrong? And by phrasing it that way, I bet you can really see how that that's an everyday life type of story because we've all come across that situation and maybe it's happened to us as well. Not, maybe it almost certainly has happened to us as well, where we just think we we've got to figure out, we think we're right, but we're actually we're actually wrong. And and the reason is that our our brains have fooled us and we've allowed ourselves to fall into some of those traps about, about assumptions that we've made about the world and our brains and we know this from a ton of research around neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Our brains are designed to make pretty quick decisions and to look for shortcuts and sometimes when we do that, we miss out on a lot of what's really going on. So we have these these kind of natural tendencies to to sometimes do frankly the wrong thing and we have to fight against that. We have to think a lot about that and we have to think again really about what we're doing. This course will build on the previous course. If any of you took that one, that was a bit more strategic, it was called lessons learned from the why smart executives fail project and and some of what I'll say will connect to the two subsequent courses in this specialization on leadership and talent and on our personal lives and how we could become better and more capable and build more meaningful lives. So let me describe in brief kind of the core modules that will, we'll talk about in this course and there are four of them and you can follow them along if you want to go on a week by week basis. And as before, I've set up a whole sequence of activities, not just these videos, but some some application exercises to help you track what I'm going to be sharing with you. And actually most most most importantly, to apply it to your own lives to your own jobs. So the first module is about how our brains are wired, how this works and how that makes such a huge difference in and how we think and how we make decisions. The second module is all about experience and expertise and I think you can find this really interesting because as important as experiences for each of us, there are two sides to it and sometimes it could hurt us and most people don't think about that. And I want to share with you why that happens, how that happens, and what we could do about that module three is digging into the most common emotional biases that affect how we think and how we act. And a module four, we put a lot of things together to really drill down onto how can we make better decisions, how can we safeguard against letting our emotions and our biases dominate our behaviour. So, as I said, all of this is very practical, lots of examples that I'm going to share with you, and and I like to create these kind of tailored application exercises to help you learn how to apply these lessons to your own work and to your own life
