Choosing Clarity over Certainty,

In his book the 5 Temptations of a CEO, Patrick Lencioni Risk asserts that the third temptation that can befall a CEO is the desire to seek certainty over clarity. One way this manifests itself, is for the CEO to seek to have all the information before making a decision. This is not a good thing, one of the skills of the CEO is to determine that he has enough (not all) information to make the decision. It is a factor or Risk versus Reward.

Risk and reward are the fundamental identities of business life in general and decision making in particular.   If you’d like to increase your risk IQ,  spend some time with Annie Duke, author of “Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts.”    As she says,  Poker is a game of decision making under conditions of uncertainty over time.  

Ms. Duke’s was working on a Ph.D in cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania with a National Science Foundation fellowship.   She took some time off to explore the practical aspects of risk by becoming a professional poker player.  In doing so she won over $4 million as a professional poker player and was World Series of Poker Champion

Increase your risk IQ with her entertaining 16 minutes TED Talk on the interrelationships of  life, risk, business and poker.    After watching this, if you think it’s a good bet that she can make you a better risk takertake a chance on investing minutes on her Google University Talk: “Thinking in Bets.”