Sheena Iyengar

World Expert on Choice, Decision-Making and Problem Solving, Professor at Columbia Business School, Bestselling Author

Topics: Thought Leadership, Strategy, Inspirational & Motivational, TED Speakers, Best Selling Author, Business, Communication, Education, Leadership, Resilience, Women Leaders, DE&I – Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Professional Development, STEM, Health & Well-Being

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Biography

Sheena Iyengaris a world expert on choice and decision-making. Her book The Art of Choosing received the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year 2010 award, and was ranked #3 on the Amazon.com Best Business and Investing Books of 2010. Her research is regularly cited in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Economist as well as in popular books, such as Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance. Dr. Iyengar has also appeared on television, including the Today Show, the Daily Show, and Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN. Her TED Talks have collectively received almost four million views and her research continues to inform markets, businesses, and individuals around the world.

Dr. Iyengar is the inaugural S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the Management Division at Columbia Business School. Growing up in New York City as a blind Indian American and the daughter of immigrants, she began to look at the choices she and others had, and how to get the most from choice. She first started researching choice as an undergrad at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where she graduated with a B.S. in Economics. She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Stanford University where her dissertation, “Choice and its Discontents,” received the Best Dissertation Award. Dr. Iyengar received the Presidential Early Career Award in 2002, and in 2011 and 2019, she was named a member of the Thinkers50, a global ranking of the top 50 management thinkers. She won the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Core Teaching from Columbia Business School in 2012 and was named one of the World’s Best B-School Professors by Poets and Quants. She has also given keynotes, and consulted for companies as wide ranging as Deloitte, Google, Bloomberg, Blizzard Entertainment, J.P. Morgan & Chase, and The North Face.

In a groundbreaking, new course called “Think Bigger,” Dr. Iyengar created a six step method for teaching people how to take advantage of lessons learned from neurological and cognitive science to put our minds to work when generating our best ideas. Her new book Think Bigger was released in 2021.

Videos

Davos 2013 - An Insight, An Idea with Sheena Iyengar

Sheena Iyengar - Talks

Speech TopicsExpand each topic to learn more

The Three C's of Choice - Choice Overload

We have more choices than ever before. So many, in fact, that in some areas of our lives we suffer from too much choice rather than from lack of it. How much choice do we need to satisfy our individual preferences and desire for variety, and at what point does our judgment begin to cloud over, leading to choices that hurt our finances, our relationships, our health and our spirit? Building on my research, I show individuals and businesses how to recognize the symptoms of choice overload and offer innovative solutions for treating the malady. My ultimate goal is to help everyone separate the important choices from the trivial ones and to teach people how to create a better choosing experience.

The Three C's of Choice - Creativity

Who doesn’t want to be more creative? People want to create art, music, and perhaps most of all, themselves. To some extent, we are creators already, constructing our lives with blocks of choice. We choose our careers and our spouses. We choose where we live, how we travel and when we schedule our entertainment. And, of course, we choose from hundreds of thousands of products in the marketplace. Creating the ideal life may seem as simple as determining our preferences and matching them to the right choices. However, we don’t always understand ourselves or our options well enough to do this. Instead of taking the time to reflect on our hopes, desires and abilities, we end up grasping for ever more choice, hoping to satisfy ourselves with excess. I explain why, contrary to expectations, unlimited choice can be constraining, while voluntarily limiting our choices can be liberating. Just as artists impose constraints on form and material to boost creativity, so limiting our choices or choosing not to choose can help us better envision and create our most beautiful selves.

Testimonials

Sheena Iyengar’s work on choice and how our minds deal with it has been groundbreaking, repeatedly surprising, and enormously important. She is someone we need to listen to.

– Atul Gawande, author of Complications and Better

Sheena is an incredible speaker. She has both the presence and the credibility, packaged with a bit of humor. Sheena went out of her way to learn about our company and products and apply insights from her research… She took the time to address and inspire us as a team, while also making her findings relevant to the various functions within the business.

– Jennifer McCusker, Sr Director, Global Talent & Org Development, Blizzard Entertainment Inc

Thank you for your contribution to making the Women in Asian Business Conference in Singapore such an outstanding success. Your presentation was a highlight of the agenda. The participation rate at the conference exceeded our expectation.

– Deutsche Bank

My CHOICE is Sheena Iyengar! She really understands the art and science of choice and is a terrific communicator of the relevant lessons to best position companies to empower employees to increase judgment, productivity, and innovation. She customizes her presentations to incorporate data she had collected from employees… I’m a big fan.

– Barry Salzberg, Former Global CEO, Deloitte

Sheena Iyengar was a big hit with the audience and really capped off our day of inspiring talks!

– St. Joseph’s Health Centre Foundation