Publications by authors named "Jan W Rivkin"
Many managers feel doomed to trade off the futile rigor of ordinary strategic planning for the hit-or-miss creativity of the alternatives. In fact, the two can be reconciled to produce novel but realistic strategies. The key is to recognize that conventional strategic planning, for all its analysis, is not actually scientific-it lacks the careful generation and testing of hypotheses that are at the heart of the scientific method.
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- Leaders often don’t realize how much they rely on analogies in decision-making, which can lead to missed insights and poor choices.
- Successful examples of analogical reasoning, like Toys R Us and CarMax, show how transferring ideas from one context to another can spark innovation.
- However, caution is needed, as relying on superficial similarities can lead to failures (like Enron), and recognizing common biases—like anchoring and confirmation bias—can help improve the effectiveness of analogical thinking.