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.
First to the stage of this fast-paced ideas jam, was Thinkers50 #1 Ranked Thinker Amy Edmondson. Renowned worldwide for her work on psychological safety, Edmondson’s latest passion is failure.
Raising the problem of the ‘failure fad’ in management thinking, she explained the importance of distinguishing between different types of failure, appreciating the discrepancy between blame-worthy failures and praise-worthy failures, and why avoiding failure is not a good strategy.