Scott Sorensen recognizes the importance of understanding how customers make decisions. After all, he is the VP of sales for BEGA's North and Central American markets. Family owned to this day, BEGA is an architectural lighting company with sales offices in 107 countries and manufacturing operations in Santa Barbara, CA, and Menden, Germany. He also has a growing appreciation of the lessons that can be learned from behavioral sciences. So when he saw the opportunity to attend the Behavioral Economics: Understanding and Shaping Customer and Employee Behavior program at Harvard Business School (HBS), enrolling was an easy decision. He shares his thoughts about his experience in the program.
My choice to take this course was a deeply personal one. I'm an avid reader with a preference for nonfiction. After reading two books in particular—Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell and Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman—I became fascinated by the relevance and power of behavioral sciences and the seemingly endless ways to apply these concepts in my own life. The "behavioral" seed took root, and quickly thereafter I found myself reading any book I could find on the subject. Being an eternal learner with a passion for the subject ultimately led me to Harvard Business School and this program.
My initial goal was simply to gain a deeper knowledge of behavioral economics. I wanted to find out who was using it to their advantage in addition to best practices in the field. This program not only met my objectives, it exceeded them. The lessons, tools, and framework for becoming a world-class decision architect were fantastic.
This program taught me how to be a good "noticer," understand how decisions are made, recognize the factors that lead to bad decisions, and learn how to change the decision-making environment to everyone's advantage. The list goes on and on. If I had to pick just one, it would be the long list of new friends and fellow learners that I met from around the world.
Unquestionably, yes. Understanding biases and motivations as well as their impact on the decision-making process has afforded me a much-needed and extremely valuable mental calibration.
The group of people HBS assembled from across the globe was second to none. Having the opportunity to be constantly surrounded by other cultures and norms made this experience much richer.
I wholeheartedly expected to learn, but I did not expect to be enlightened. There was a deeply introspective undercurrent to the entire agenda. It was a tough but necessary look in the mirror. And I can say with great certainty that I will be a better leader, friend, husband, and father as a result of my time there. Without a doubt, I rank my time at HBS as one of the top 10 meaningful experiences of my life.
