Learning from Others' Misfortune
Concordia University’s David O'Brien Centre for Sustainable Enterprise (DOCSE) established the Distinguished Speaker Series to help inspire students, academic researchers and practicing managers to consider greater sustainability related possibilities in their work. By bringing in leading scholars and thought leaders in the field of sustainable enterprise, DOCSE hopes to advance knowledge and also to change practice.
DOCSE’s first speaking event of the year is on Friday, January 20 at the John Molson School of Business and is presented in collaboration with the Management Science Research Centre of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University.
The event features Robert Klassen, an operations management professor at the University of Western Ontario’s Ivey Business School. Klassen’s research focuses on the linkages between the natural environment, social issues and firm performance.
His lecture, entitled Learning from Others’ Misfortune: Understanding Managerial Biases in the Use of Knowledge-Capture Processes to Reduce Operational Risk, will explore why so many firms seem to overlook flawed operational processes that should be evident from observing the problems faced by competing firms.
According to Klassen’s research in behavioural operations management, the reason firms often ignore significant risks and experience recurring losses is because of the biases of risk managers, who limit their firms’ opportunities to learn from others’ mistakes and consequent misfortunes.
Klassen believes that “senior managers can develop organizational systems and training to encourage risk managers to expand their knowledge-capture processes to increasingly learn from the operational losses of other firms.”
When: Friday, January 20 from 11 a.m. to noon
Where: Room MB-6.240, John Molson School of Business Building (1450 Guy St.)
Related links:
• Distinguished Speaker Series
• John Molson School of Business