Thinkers50@BUQuestrom: Passion & Purpose | Sheena Iyengar: Meaningful choices

What drives the work of the world’s leading management thinkers?
That was the question posed at Thinkers50@BUQuestrom: Passion & Purpose, a live virtual event held at Boston University Questrom School of Business on 20th April 2023.

Co-sponsored by Thinkers50, Passion & Purpose sought to uncover the motivation behind top management thinkers: What inspires their research? What gets them out of bed in the morning? How do they translate their passions into purpose and impact for business?
To challenge the thinkers a little further, each one had just 15 minutes to deliver their idea – including questions from the audience.

Sheena Iyengar is the ST Lee Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and a Thinkers50 Ranked Thinker. In her 15 minutes of passion and purpose she expounded on the power and limitations of choice, and how you can use choice to construct novel combinations and solve complex problems.

Drawing on her new book, Think Bigger: How to Innovate (Columbia University Press 2023), Iyengar shared her six-step method for innovation, which is all about creating meaningful choices. The first step is to choose the problem; the second is to break it down into its most important parts; third is comparing wants – motivations and preferences; fourth is to search in and out of the box; fifth is the choice map – imagining new combinations of tactics; and the last step is the third eye test: do others see what you see?

WATCH IT HERE: