Mihnea Moldoveanu

Olivier Leclerc

Familiar modes of problem solving may be efficient, but they often prevent us from discovering innovative solutions to more complex problems. To create meaningful change, we must train ourselves to discover previously unseen variables in day-to-day challenges. The Design of Insight is intended to be a personal problem-solving platform for decision makers and advisors who seek answers to critical business questions. It introduces an approach that uses multiple "problem-solving languages" to systematically expand our understanding of problem framing and high quality problem solving. Useful as a critical thinking approach or a think-out-loud document for strategic teams, this brief is a resource for enriching and implementing thoughtful management practices.

How to Solve Any Business Problem

The Design of Insight

Nitin Nohria

An exploration of the powerful role of anxiety, ambition, and envy in shaping both our individual lives and society as a whole. At the heart of the human experience lies anxiety caused by the realization that the world is unknown, forever eluding our control. And out of this anxiety arises the master passions of ambition and envy, which we repress to mask their power over our lives. Discussion of the role of the emotions in our lives is not new, but Mihnea Moldoveanu and Nitin Nohria go much further, showing how these passions shape not only our individual lives but our social and organizational culture as well. The master passions are not pretty, and so we cover them with the more socially acceptable faces of reason and morality. Moldoveanu and Nohria guide the reader in revealing the real impetus behind such actions as firing a friend, leaving a lover, or even pillaging your own people. Below the rational explanation, they show, often lies a willingness to hurt or even destroy others to fuel our own ambitions or quench the fires of envy. The authors offer intriguing thought experiments and examples from their own lives as they expose the power of the master passions. Deftly weaving ideas from psychology (Sigmund Freud), sociology (Max Weber), literature (William Shakespeare, Albert Camus), and philosophy (David Hume, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche) with the personal, they build a strong argument that society would be much healthier if we faced the deception and self-deception that pervade our lives.

Emotion, Narrative, and the Development of Culture

Master Passions

Inside Man presents readers with an exercise in modeling human ways of being—thinking, feeling, acting. This book does not merely introduce models, but also attempts to teach modeling and to produce, within the reader, the predispositions and attitudes of the modeler: a distance from the individual whose behavior is modeled, an engineering approach to the model-building process, a (self)-critical approach to the model testing and elaboration process, and a pedagogical and a therapeutic approach to enacting and communicating models. Author Mihnea C. Moldoveanu makes the process and the phenomenon of modeling transparent and explicit, and clarifies the reasons for which modeling human behavior has to be an interactive process between the modeler and the modeled. This perspective situates Inside Man at the intersection of analytical and computational thinking about rationality, reasoning, choice and thinking, and the tradition of action science and action research.

Mihnea Moldoveanu

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