MIND KNOTS
The Book That Will Challenge
and Even Change
the Way You Think,
Lead and Live
Where did we go wrong?
Too often, members of an executive board pose this question as they grapple with an ineffective leader. Psychological biases can impair a leader’s effectiveness and damage your organization – but they don’t have to.
Mind Knots identifies cognitive and emotional biases that often distort the thinking of even the best and brightest executives, hijacking rational leadership. Psychological biases cannot be eliminated, but they can be managed and reframed as strengths. Mind Knots shows you how.
Using real-life case studies, Mind Knots provides a framework for bias-sensitive business leadership. Here you’ll find specific processes, financial considerations, mission-based initiatives, and capabilities to help leaders chart a course through the biases that bind and blind them. Discover strategic maneuvers and organizational models for harnessing cognitive biases to work for you instead of against you. Reform the knots that once tied you down into knots that move you forward to achieve your leadership, business and life goals.
All aboard for this important journey.
- Lisa Tromba
Praise For Mind Knots
Dr. Vince Molinaro
Strategic Leadership Advisor & New York Times Bestselling Author
In a world where executives are often overwhelmed, Mind Knots is essential reading. This concise guide sheds light on how leaders can overcome biases to make clearer, more effective decisions. It's an indispensable tool for any leader striving to navigate the complexities of executive decision -making with confidence and clarity.
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Hal Reiter
Chairman,
Herbert Mines Associates
You will see yourself in Tromba's book. She awakens your consciousness and asks you to take a fresh look at your own management style, and she provides great tools to make yourself a better leader.
Law Burks
President,
IDEX Energy
Tromba has developed breakthrough leadership insights on the dangers of cognitive biases while framing highly effective antidotes. Mind Knots is a powerful must read for Board directors, C-Suite, P&L and functional leaders who believe in servant leadership and want to deliver more sustainable business outcomes.
Rose Bentley
Chief Operating Officer,
Foundant Technologies
When navigating what can be choppy waters, I found this book to be a practical guide on how to turn your biases into strengths. For leaders today who want to understand how both cognitive and emotional bias, at a subconscious level influence us as leaders, this book is a must read.
Cary Broussard
Author, From Cinderella to CEO, Founder, Broussard Global C2CEO
Mind Knots warrants awareness and attention. It will change the mindset of those who read it - For those who want to work through their own biases, improve their lives, and the lives of others and entire organizations. Getting an inside look into Tromba's experience and mindset is exhilarating - Her poise, determination and creativity inform her writing style. Take advantage of her insights - you'll be glad you did.
"You are unlikely to find a more comprehensive way to assess the impact of bias on yourself and your organization than with this practical guide for improving leadership effectiveness - by proactively managing the impact of deep-seated biases on your organization."
Michael McCann - President, Twin City Fan Companies
A Foreword to Mind Knots
Those who recruit leaders must go well beyond educational qualifications, market familiarity, and professional experience.
They must get under the surface to figure out what is going on psychologically and how a leader's mind maps to the reality of the situation. Lisa's question became, 'What cognitive and emotional biases could derail an otherwise brilliant executive, and are there ways I can prepare them with knowledge, which is apposite, empathetic and accurate?"
That's what Lisa has done in this book. The unconscious biases I've been referring to are what she calls "mind knots."
- Dr. E. Ted Prince, Founder and CEO of Perth Leadership Institute, Author of The Three Financial Styles of Very Successful Leaders
Excerpt from the Foreword to Mind Knots
Guided by research studies, experts in the field, and practical experience, this book unveils the reality of cognitive and emotional biases that too often hijack sound judgment, decision-making, and action-taking
- tying leaders down in their leadership and lives.
Mind Knots delivers actionable strategies to drive bias-aware leadership through better thinking, counter-bias techniques, models and frameworks for leaders and organizations.
Take the lead rather than being led by
these subconscious forces.
You will be better positioned in your leadership and in your life.
You own your mind knots.
Either you lead them or they will lead you.
My Author Story
As Managing Partner, I lead LTA, Lisa Tromba Associates Executive Search (fomerly Luisi Tromba Advisors of which I was co-founder), and Leadership Intelligence Services, LLC, which I founded in 2010.
My experience working with leaders spans over 25 years as a partner in three global search firms, and earlier experience within a private equity environment, following foundational business experience with IBM where my leadership interest and experience began.
Over the course of my career, I've been blessed with the great fortune of working with leaders in companies at all stages of evolution from lower mid-market to multi-billion-dollar global enterprises, across industries, markets, and countries, recruiting leaders for different contexts, situations, missions, and roles.
Yes, that's a lot of leaders, with a lot of different biases. Some of those biases served them well...and many did not.
My life's work is helping organizations and leaders to realize their leadership and business vision through clear thinking, reasoning, and evidence-based decision-making when it comes to selecting leaders. Leadership selection is a critical business decision and mental shortcuts don't work. Not for the organization, nor for the leader.
Writing Mind Knots has been a journey of four-plus years. While my book journey began in 2019, my curiosity and the energy behind the book have been swelling for most of my professional life as both an observer and an unknowing host to cognitive and emotional biases.
At first, I couldn't explain, nor did I have the understanding or vocabulary to describe the phenomenon of psychological biases. Intrinsically motivated from both a personal and professional perspective, I was committed to figuring it out and to helping others understand the phenomenon as well.
In the planning stages of the book,
I considered several titles and then one morning Mind Knots came to me and well, those two words have proven to be a simple way to describe the complex phenomenon of psychological biases that I was searching for.
Mind Knots provides the opportunity to heighten awareness and understanding of cognitive and emotional biases and how they impact the decisions we make and the actions we take. Because our mind is the lens through which we view everything.
We would be wise to know and understand potential enemies within our selves - our mind knots - to be better positioned in our leadership and our life.
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