Great people decisions

The first plenary session of SABF 2011 was in charge of Claudio Fernandez Araoz, current Senior Adviser of Egon Zehnder International. His objective was to define features and challenges of work dynamics nowadays. His presentation was focused on three key questions: **Why do great people decisions matter? Why are they so hard to make and how can we master this decision-making? **Discipline, studying and listening become us masters of decisions. This will help us to create a better world.

Fernandez Araoz pointed out that everything we do depends on the people you have worked with. Therefore, it is important to know how to select people. In exponential times, there is a certain impact on people selection and the improved performance for high complexity tasks is increasing more and more. In this context, the value of people decisions also grows exponentially.

On the one hand, similarity and comfort are factors humans need to count with but, we also need to challenge and to go against the status quo. One failure of humans is to overrate the abilities of people, thinking they are better than what they really are. Do we have the wrong software (as education)?

If we have motivation to learn how to do it, we can be emotionally competitive at any age. To conclude, Fernandez Araoz ended up his speech inviting us to stop deciding by our instincts and first impressions; let’s do it rationally, thinking hard.