Managerial Decision Making

Assignment No. 1

Summary of TED Talk “Our Loss of Wisdom”

By

Muhammad Qamar Riaz (SAP ID 12851)

MS Project Management (Group B)

Department of Management Sciences

Riphah International University, Rawalpindi Campus

 Our Loss of Wisdom
Barry Schwartz is a psychologist who studied morality and Decision Making. In his TED Talk
“Our Loss of Wisdom”, he explained the Aristotle’s Concept of Practical Wisdom, Which is a
combination of moral will and moral skill. He justified this concept by giving the example of the
Job Description of the Hospital Janitorial staff. These Job Descriptions includes: emptying the
trash bin, moping the floor, and sweeping the floor etc. Despite of the long list of the JD’s, it
does not include a single task that detailed Human interaction. When some psychologist
interviewed some janitorial staff to get their views about their Job, they showed that they make
judgement calls every day. For example one of the Janitorial staff member replied to the
psychologist that how he can mop a corridor when a frail patient was doing exercise and walking
around the corridor just to rebuild his strength. Similarly another staff member Charlene told the
psychologists that how she ignored her supervisor’s admonition, and didn’t vacuum the visitor’s
lounge because there were some family members who were there all day, every day.

This type of behaviors not only makes the people feel better, but also improves the quality of
patient care and run the hospital well. These types of actions are not the part of the JD’s of
Janitorial staff, that’s why not every staff member do this but those who do it thought that  these
type of human actions that includes kindness, care, and empathy are an essential part of the job.

By showing kindness and empathy, janitors apply their “practical wisdom.” People with high
levels of practical wisdom call on their “moral will” and “moral skill” to guide them in pursuit of
what’s decent and right, even if that means adjusting their behavior or disregarding the rules.
They draw on their experience to decide how best to react.

During the TED Talk, he said that brilliance is rampant. Here he explain two concept. These are:

 You don’t need to be brilliant to be wise.

 Brilliance is not enough without wisdom

It’s as likely to get you and others into trouble, as anything else.

Barry Schwartz explained that to avoid wrong doings and promote good behavior, we should
reach for two tools just to fix these problems. These are

 Rules
 Incentives

He justified it through by telling a story of lemonade to the audience. In this story 11 year old
son asked his father to get some lemonade and his father rushed to the concession stand to buy it.
All they had was Mike’s Hard Lemonade which contains alcohol (5%). Father had no idea the
Lemonade drink contained alcohol, and so he brought it back. A security guard spotted it, so he
called the police. The police called an ambulance. The ambulance took the boy to the hospital
where the emergency room ascertained that the kid had no alcohol in his blood, and they were
ready to let the kid go but the Child Welfare Protective Agency said “no,” and the child was sent
to a foster home for three days. At that point, can the child go home? Well, the judge said, “Yes,
but only if the father leaves the house and checks into a motel.” After two-weeks, the family was
reunited. All knows that father was innocent but they were supposed to follow the procedure.

Similarly incentives also effect someone’s moral will to do what is right. He explained it through
the example where Switzerland government was trying to dump their nuclear waste. The
government announced a national referendum and some psychologists went around a polled and
asked some citizens a question, “Would you be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in your
community?” Astonishingly 50% of the citizens said “yes.”. They know that this is dangerous for
their society and also, it will decrease their property value in spite of that they said yes because
they thought that being a citizen, it is their responsibility. Similarly, the psychologists asked a
slightly different question to some other peoples that if they should be paid (6 week’s salary in
addition to their own salary), every year, then they would you be willing to allow us to dump a
nuclear waste dump in your community. This time, only 25% Participants say yes instead of
50%.
What happens is that the introduction of the incentive lead us towards what is my interests rather
then what is my responsibility.

Barry Schwartz said that Reliance on incentives demoralize professional activity in two senses. It

causes the people to lose their morale who are involved in that activity and the activity itself lost
the morality. When professions are demoralized, everyone in them becomes dependent on, and
addicted to incentives, and they stop asking whether it is right or not?

Obviously, this is not the way people want to do their work. So what we can do is that we should
have to remoralize our work. One way of not doing is that: teach more ethics courses. There is no
better way to show people you’re not serious than to tie up everything you have to say about
ethics into a little package with a bow, and consign it to the margins as an ethics course. Instead
we should have to celebrate moral exemplars. These moral exemplars not only include
extraordinary heroes but also include ordinary heroes such as Janitors etc.

Finally he advised that being heads of the organization, we should have to promote the
environments that encourage and nurture both moral skill and moral will. Even the wisest and
most meaning people will give up if they have to swim against the current in the organizations in
which they work.
As a teachers, we should promote the ordinary heroes, the moral exemplars to the people we
mentor. There are few things we must have to remember is that we always are teaching &
someone is always watching us.

In the end, he focused on one thing that what children needs to learn is character. They need to
learn to respect themselves, their schoolmates, their teachers, and most important, they need to
respect learning.