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 directs their research? What keeps them awake at night and gets them out of bed in the morning? In a fast-paced ideas jam, 14 thinkers each had 15 minutes to present their passion and purpose.
First to the stand was Thinkers50 #1 Ranked Thinker, Professor Amy Edmondson, whose work on psychological safety has garnered worldwide acclaim. 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. Edmondson’s forthcoming book, The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, is out in September 2023.
