An engineering graduate of the Ecole centrale de Paris, James Teboul is a professor at Insead and a consultant to a number of industrial and service organisations. He specialises in corporate decision-making and change management.
Philippe Damier, a professor of neurology at the Nantes University Hospital, is the author of Décider en toute connaissance de soi (Odile Jacob, 2014).
When faced with decision-making or change, our brain often reacts by making mistakes or producing biases that reduce our freedom of action. Among the most frequent problems are: the natural aversion to risk-taking and loss; the tendency to remain fixed on short-term results or immediate gratification; the propensity to generalise and to react automatically.
Just as high-level athletes owe it to themselves to acquire a good knowledge of their bodies to become more efficient, business leaders responsible for making decisions, managing employees or leading change must have a thorough knowledge of the potential and the limits of the human brain in order to anticipate certain ways of reacting. The practical applications based on the new knowledge now being introduced by the neurosciences will help them to better understand and improve their professional skills, leading to greater freedom of action.