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When we want to learn a new skill in life, we try out a new behaviour. Some behaviours fulfill their intended purpose; others do not. Feedback-signals from the environment that tell us whether or not the behaviour we produced had the intended effect-is essential to changing, adapting or modifying human behaviour. That's what learning is all about. Learning theorists and practitioners agree that feedback is a prime enabler of learning. Yet in higher education, it is spotty, ill-timed or utterly missing. The authors-who head up the Self-Development Lab at the University of Toronto-show what can be done about it.

Modern business problems are ill-defined, ill-structured and require collective action in order to solve them. As a result, the authors argue, modern business problem solvers need to embrace Model-Based Problem Solving. They describe a new discipline that is nurtured by decades of scientific thinking and practice, with four components: model building, model testing, model calibration and model fusion. Key to the approach is recognizing-and addressing-the issues that arise whenever people work together. They provide advice for harnessing disagreement and turning it into productive and generative tension.

Big data' is hailed as the next mega-problem for business, and rightly so, says the author. He argues that business has to solve two different sets of problems here: prediction problems (what will happen if we do this?) and optimization problems (what is the best way to get this to happen?) Intelligence is not enough to tackle these issues, he says: big data requires ingenuity. He defines 'the ingenuity effect' and shows that it entails three key skills: modeling, coding and sensing.

New entrepreneurs are in a tough spot: sixty-five per cent of seed-round startups in North America never make it to the next level of funding, and just 12 per cent end up successfully delivering a product or service. Why even try? "Because my idea is better than all the others, and the numbers don't apply to me." We all have such 'necessary illusions' in our minds, says the author. Dangerous delusions, on the other hand, are just that. The question is, how to distinguish between necessary illusions and dangerous delusions? He argues that the answer is to become an experimentalist about one's own life and business, which forces you to take an outsider's view of it.

Is your fund manager's sudden bullishness the result of some special insight, or is it the result of the torrid love affair he is engaged in providing a hormonal charge to his perception of the facts? Is your chairman's congratulatory smile addressed at you, or, rather, to the other people around the table, whom he intends to see him smiling at you so that they don't think he bears you a grudge - which, unfortunately, he actually does? Welcome to the ZOO -- the Zone Of Oblivion, both yours and that of others. The ZOO is a special place: it comprises all of the facts, feelings and experiences that make a huge difference to you and your business, but which you neither know about, nor know that you don't know. The author provides guidance for thriving in this murky, ambiguous - yet entirely human environment.

In today's complex environment, the most successful thinkers are able to quickly and effectively abstract the best qualities of radically different 'ways of seeing' and apply them to the situation at hand. The authors describe how the minds of these 'integrative thinkers' are dialectical - 'diaminds' for short - in that they can holds at least two contradictory ways of seeing in any critical situation, give each its full due, and instead of fleeing from the resulting tension, embrace it and come up with a third and better way. 'Stretching' the mind to achieve this, they argue, is a cornerstone of the diamind's way of being in the world; they describe how this is accomplished and how we can willfully augment our mind's faculties of real-time thinking to achieve creative solutions.

A large body of research shows that people prefer 'smaller, sooner' payoffs to 'larger, later' payoffs when the smaller payoffs are imminent, i.e. when the 'sooner' of the 'smaller' is pretty close to 'right now'. However, when both payoffs are distant in the future, people tend to prefer the larger payoff, even though the time lag from the smaller to the larger payoff would be the same as before. In other words, something, somewhere makes people 'flip' their preferences. The author argues that this human tendency - called Hyperbolic Discounting -- is equally prevalent in senior management teams, and that it manifests itself in various types of behavior, including 'itches', addictions, delusions, sellouts and 'Utopian dystopias'.

Accountability has become a major buzzword of late, cited to be at the core of market meltdowns and revivals and one of the basic buildings blocks of successful businesses. As a result, it has become a topic of investigation by a large coterie of consultants, social scientists and practitioners. Break the riddle of accountability, the thinking goes, and you will have solved one of the biggest issues in modern business. The author argues that most of the proposed approaches focus too narrowly on tasks, responsibilities, personal attributes and measurement systems - all of which are important aspects of accountability, but overlook its three most important features: its relationality, reflexivity and relativity. He explains that accountability is relational in that it involves a promise or commitment from me to you; it is reflexive in that it says something about me and about our relationship that I have to internalize and accept; and it is relative to a set of background assumptions and a background audience - made up of those who can witness my commitment to you and those who cannot, but could. Keeping promises and accounting for their breaches in credible, genuine and authentic ways is what makes organizations work, societies thrive, and cultures promulgate themselves into the future. The commitment path described by the author can thus be seen as an 'audit trail' for the journey of promising, a way of assigning responsibility in the face of ambiguity, mendacity and subterfuge.

In an age where the digital machine can outperform the human mind at any task that can be represented as an algorithm, Integrative Thinking is the best revenge. The author argues that this particular kind of thinking still matters to success in business, and that figuring out how to do more of it requires a new conceptualization of thinking in terms of its integrative functions - the functions that produce successful integration across knowledge and interactional domains and confer agency upon decision makers. He describes three types of integrative thinking and why they stand out for the value they create: substantive integration; interactional integration and agency (the integration of seeing, feeling, thinking and action.)

Yesterday's approaches to problem solving just won't cut it in today's complex environment, say the authors. The high-value decision maker of the future will be characterized by a capacity for Integrative Thinking. They show that Integrative Thinking stands not as an enemy to traditional business disciplines, on whose shoulders it can be seen to squarely rest, but rather as a constructive challenge to produce more adaptive-reasoning patterns, more valuable instruments of prediction, and a more inclusive approach to inter-disciplinary dialogue. The new model for business education they argue for acknowledges the vital role of integration in modern business, stressing the virtues of 'nimble mindedness', 'big mindedness' and 'tough mindedness' over the seductive trap of narrow perfectionism.

For much of the 20th century, labor and capital fought bitterly for control of the industrialized economy. The titans of industry ultimately won a resounding victory over the unions, but the story doesn't end there. In today's economy, value is largely the product of knowledge and information. Companies cannot generate profits without the ideas, skills, and leadership capabilities of knowledge workers. It's these factors--not technologies, not factories, and certainly not capital--that give the most successful companies their unique advantages. As knowledge workers come to realize this, and see that the demand for their talent outstrips the supply, they are steadily wresting more and more of the profits from shareholders. This time the battle is between the sources of capital and the producers of value, and how it will end is far from clear. With this new battle, we're also witnessing a fundamental change in the political alignment of capital. The Left is now siding with "the common shareholder" against the well-compensated top tier of the labor pool. Shareholders seeing an unprecedented proportion of the return on their investments siphoned off to employees may well ask, Is there no end to it? The growing tensions between shareholders and managers cannot be ignored, and capitalism is at a crossroads--again.

Working with Shell's country manager for Nigeria, the company's Committee of Managing Directors must decide how to respond to the Nigerian government's decision to impose the death sentence on Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other leaders of a movement for the rights of the Ogoni (one of Nigeria's 240 ethnic groups). As the case opens, Saro-Wiwa and his codefendants have just been found guilty of inciting murder in a trial that international observers have criticized as deeply flawed. Saro-Wiwa, an environmentalist, writer, businessman, television producer, and human rights activist, has been a vocal critic of not only the Nigerian government but also Shell. Provides background on Shell, on its business in Nigeria, and on environmental and human rights issues in the Niger Delta.

Supplements the (A) case.

Spreadsheet supplement for case 399126.

In the mid-twentieth century, global organizations began to promise employees economic security, personal fulfillment, and respect in return for performing clearly delineated activities. Employees were willing to make sacrifices, and employers were willing to invest in training in the mutual expectation of future reward. But now, intense competition and rapid change are destroying predictability. Virtual organizations and many current managerial practices, such as reengineering, continuous improvement, matrix management, and "rightsizing," ignore this human need. As a result, employees keep their resumes up to date and their commitments to a minimum. The best way to approach organizational change is with the realization that dire predictions are better than no predictions at all or positive predictions that no one believes. Managers must make few promises and keep those they do make. The more managers make clear to employees which courses of action will improve their lives, the more employees can focus on creating value.