Welcome to the course. My name is Syd Finkelstein and it's a pleasure to be sharing with you really one of my most favorite topics, something I've been thinking about and working on for a very long time. The course is about personal leadership. It's about you as an individual and how to be a great and wise leader not just at work but at home and in your professional life and your personal life. If you've been with me for the first three courses in this Coursera specialization, then you have a pretty good idea of what I've been sharing with you along the way. Lessons and ideas accumulated from many many years of work, research, with leaders, with managers and everyday people trying to do the best they can, both professionally and personally. In Course 1, as a quick reminder, lessons learned from the Why Smart Executives Fail project. It taught us how to learn from mistakes, how to look for and avoid falling into the most common traps that can arise, what that early warning system might look like and insight into how to get better at strategy, at culture, at organization, and at leadership as well. That was a lot and we covered a lot of ground and had a lot of great tips and ideas. In Course 2, how to make better decisions. It was based on my book Think Again. We learned how our brains are wired and why that makes a difference. How emotional tags can disrupt our supposedly logical, rational thinking that we often assume we engage in most of the time. Truth is we actually don't. How core decision-making biases like relying on the wrong experience, allowing our subconscious to push for self-interest that dominate our actions even when it hurts us, making prejudgment despite what's going on around us and falling into attachments that can cause more harm than good. All of these things play out in business decisions and our personal decisions. Very importantly, we also learn what to do about it so that we don't need to think that we're right when we're actually really wrong. In Course 3, on Superbosses, the practical and learnable sets of skills that can help anyone, a manager, an individual contributor alike to become a more impactful and more successful leader. This course is different in several respects. It's not based on one of my top books, is based on my latest thinking and research which may make its way into a book at some point, who knows but for now, right now as you work with me on this course, it's fresh and hopefully you'll find they're not just useful with plenty of tips for work and for life but meaningful as well. In many ways it's more personal in the first three courses in this specialization but because it's a combination of four decades of studying and learning, teaching and sharing about leaders, about people and even about life. My goal, and really the goal I want to set out for you as you do this course with me, it's the change. To think differently about who you are and what you do, to become more capable of taking charge of your own professional and personal life. To become, if you will, a wise leader or a wiser person and maybe even a happier person. As before, there are four modules in this course. The first is the one most directly on leadership, your personal leadership and how you can start to fulfill even more of the potential you have by changing how you think and how you communicate with others. The second module is on creativity and if you've been doing any of the previous courses, you know that creativity is a big thing for me. I think about it a lot and I think it's a big and important factor. We'll talk about creativity and how to make it part of your life and again how to be smart in observing the world around you so that you can be the one who sees maybe what others often don't. The third module I call life hacks. Just another way of saying I've learned a few things that are pretty practical over the years about stuff we do, about stuff we care about and I want to share it with you what some of those hacks are; shortcuts, ways of thinking to accomplish stuff that we do care about that are very very important. Finally, module 4, we return to personal leadership where I'll share with you, well, the most important lessons I've learned about how each of us can be great in whatever it is we choose to spend our time on. It requires an understanding of nuance, a paradox, certainly of learning and who we are as individuals. It's something we can do so why wouldn't we? Throughout, as I think is the hallmark of the first three courses in this specialization, I've created these unique set of application exercises that are personalized, that are practical and I think if done with some serious intent will pay off in more ways than you can imagine. Let's get started.
