Ep. 181 - Gleb Tsipursky, Author of Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters

In this episode, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Gleb Tsipursky, Author of Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Avoid Terrible Advice, Cognitive Biases, and Poor Decisions). They discuss bad business decisions, why they go wrong, emotions impacting decision making, making best case plans, iterative planning, great leaders, and high-impact shortcuts

Interview Transcript (To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io.)

Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, and collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Gleb Tsipursky, he is a cognitive neuroscientist, an expert on behavioral economics and decision making. He runs a company called Disaster Avoidance Experts. He's worked with companies like Aflac and IBM and Honda, Wells Fargo, and many, many others. Welcome to the show Gleb. 

Gleb Tsipursky: Thank you so much for having me on, Brian. It's a pleasure. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on because you've got a brand-new book out called Never go with your gut: How pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters, and it's also very pertinent to our audience. This whole world of innovation and how do you make decisions in a world that's constantly changing. Let's start off with a little bit of background about yourself. 

Gleb Tsipursky: I was fascinated by how my parents made some bad decisions with each other, and it got me fascinated in decision making. You know, my dad, he was a real estate agent, so he had the variable income and he hid some money from my mom and bought a house on the side. And when she found out she was really pissed. And that led to a big blowout fight, which led to them separating for a while and then they got back together. But you can never really rebuild the trust again. And then when I was growing older, I came of age. In 1999 is when I was 18 and all the dotcoms were booming. WebVan, Pets.com and so on. All of these businesses, which. By the time I was 21 they all went bust. And that was really frustrating for me as someone who was observing it and seeing all these people who are supposedly smart, wealthy people, investing ordinary citizens, you know, people whose retirement went down the drains when things went bust. And I'm someone who really cares about people. I have utilitarian values. I want the most good for the most number. And so that's really motivated me to study decision making. What causes people to make bad decisions. What caused them to make good decisions and how we as individuals, leaders, investors, innovators, can make better decisions going forward. Why Decisions Go Wrong

Brian Ardinger: Why do decisions go wrong? 

Gleb Tsipursky: The most important reason why decisions go wrong is that we don't notice how our emotions influence our decisions. The research on this topic and cognitive neuroscience shows that our emotions drive about 80 to 90% of our decision making, and we don't realize how much we're driven by our emotions.  People make their decisions often based on their best reactions. They feel something is right and therefore they do it. They feel this information is true and therefore they believe it. 

To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io