Why did I choose this resource?
I chose to read this chapter because this really teaches how to innovate and make drastic changes to companies like Anant as a whole.
What did you learn from it?
I learned that virtually all businesses today go through the competitiveness of changing their companies to fit today’s culture. However, making a changes to a large business isn’t so easy. Innovation takes place when different ideas, perceptions, and judgement collide. As a result, the conflicts that take place may be drastic enough to end the overall process.
Key Knowledge
- Avoid the so-called comfortable clone syndrome, which is a state in which coworkers share similar interests and training; everyone thinking alike without conflicts within.
- Work towards a productive process called creative abrasion. This type of thinking understands that different people have different thinking styles: analytical or intuitive, conceptual or experiential, social or independent, logical or values driven.
- Cognitive differences are varying approaches to perceiving and assimilating data, making decisions, solving problems, and relating to other people.
- In a cognitively diverse environment, a message sent is not necessarily a message received.
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
The MBTI is the most widely used personality-assessment instrument in the world. Designed by a mother-and-daughter team, Isabel Myers and her mother Katherine Briggs, the actual test is designed by Carl Jung. The MBTI is widely used in business, psychology, and education, as well as in career counseling. The test uses four different pairs of attributes to create a matrix of 16 personality types.
- Extraversion versus introversion- The first pair looks at where people prefer to focus their attention. These E/I descriptors focus on the source of someone’s mental energy: extroverts draw energy from other people; introverts draw energy from themselves. Each finds the other’s preferred operating conditions in the process.
- Sensing versus “Intuition”- the second pair identifies how one absorbs information. “Sensors” gather data through their five senses, whereas “iNtuitives” rely on less direct perceptions, such as patterns, relationships, and hunches. For example, when asked to describe the same painting, a group of S’s might comment on the brush strokes or the scar on the subject’s left cheek, wheras a group of N’s might imagine from the troubled look in the subject’s eyes that he lived in difficult times or suffered from depression.
- Thinking versus feeling- The third pair indicates how one makes decisions once information is gathered. Feeling types (F) use their emotional intelligence to make decisions based on values — their internal sense of right and wrong. Thinking types (T) tend to make decisions based on logic and “objective” criteria- their assessment of truth and false.
- Judging versus perceiving- The fourth pair describes how a person is oriented toward the outer world. Judging (J) types have a high need for closure. They reach conclusions quickly based on available data and move on. Perceiving types (P) prefer to keep their options open. They wait until they have gathered what they consider to be enough information to decide. J’s crave certainty, and P’s love ambiguity.
How can we as a company or individuals use this?
By striving to innovate and change major logistics within companies throughout our lives, the probability of succeeding in the company’s endeavors will be highly improved.
