Sublime

The entrepreneur is the dreamer, the visionary, and the creative mind. • The manager is the person who thinks about return on investment (ROI), near-term success, and productivity. • The technician gets the work done. She follows the manager’s guidance and is concerned about today’s success.

Operationalizing solutions is now more important than authoring new wisdom. It is telling that the graduate-level business degree is called a master’s in business administration. The problem is that administering blueprint solutions from past challenges naively underestimates the complexity of today’s world. And it leaves us ill-equipped to address

shopping less for the sheer brain power of critical individuals and more for an organization that can bring past experience to bear in solving these problems.

makes things worse that we tend to like our first ideas the best and are very reluctant to let go of them, irrespective of their actual relevance (Strack and Mussweiler 1997). And before you now wonder if it would be a good idea to overcome the limitations of brainstorming by assembling a group of friends to brainstorm together, forget it: More peo

Executives who complain about how undervalued their firm’s shares are or who opine about its true worth are probably more concerned with the value of their options than with making solid, long-term business decisions. Self-promotional managers, meanwhile, are not likely to make decisions that are in the best interests of long-term shareholders. If

the proper way to elicit information from a group is not by starting with a public discussion but by confidentially collecting each person’s judgment.