Daniel Kahneman's Strategy for How Your Firm Can Think Smarter

Nobel economics laureate and psychologist Daniel Kahneman -- considered the father of behavioral economics – retired from his teaching position at Princeton a few years ago to co-found a consulting firm in New York. In a talk at the recent Wharton People Analytics Conference, he said of his consulting experience that he had "expected to be awed" by the quality of the decision-making in organizations "that need to make profits to survive in a competitive world." "You look at large organizations that are supposed to be optimal, rational. And the amount of folly in the way these places are run, the stupid procedures that they have, the really, really poor thinking you see all around you, is actually fairly troubling," he said, noting that there is much that could be improved. Figuring out how to make the act of decision-making "commensurate with the complexity and importance of the stakes" is a huge problem, in Kahneman's view, to which the business world does not devote much thought.