Improve Your Critical Thinking at Work

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2019

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Helen Lee Bouygues, founder of the Reboot Foundation, believes that a lack of critical thinking is responsible for many business failures. She says organizational leaders often rely too heavily on expertise and then jump to conclusions. Instead, leaders should deliberately approach each problem and devote time thinking through possible solutions. The good news, she says, is that critical thinking skills can developed and practiced over time. Bouygues is the author of the HBR.org article "3 Simple Habits to Improve Your Critical Thinking."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Kurt Nick is here from Ideacast. I want to tell you about the Big Take
0:05.1	podcast from Bloomberg News. Each weekday they bring you one important story
0:10.0	from their global newsroom like how AI will upend your life and why China's
0:15.4	targeting the US dollar. Check out the big take from Bloomberg wherever you listen. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish.
0:43.0	You know the story, maybe it's even a nightmare of yours.
0:50.0	One day the company's flying high, no reason to change anything.
0:56.7	Customers and contracts will always be there. And then one day the money
1:01.5	stops flowing in and the business is suddenly in real trouble.
1:05.0	Our guest today knows this all too well.
1:08.0	She has been an interim CEO, CFO, or COO at more than a dozen companies. Sometimes they needed her because they were
1:15.5	mismanaged. Some failed to stay in front of changing technologies. In a few cases,
1:20.8	members of the senior team were simply negligent.
1:23.9	But in her experience, all these organizational problems shared one root cause, a lack of
1:28.9	critical thinking.
1:31.1	Our guest is Helen Leib Week.
1:33.0	She is the founder of the reboot foundation.
1:35.0	Based in Paris, the nonprofit helps parents, teachers and employers think more critically
1:40.0	about their problems.
1:42.0	She's also the author of the
1:43.1	HBR.org article Three Simple Habits to improve your critical thinking.
1:48.1	Helen, thanks for being here. Thank you for having me, Kurt. transitional periods for a bunch of big companies and you say that many people's
2:06.0	business problems really come down to simple errors in critical thinking that
	...

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