Sheena Iyengar – Keynote Speaker

Sheena Iyengar is a blind Indian American professor at the Columbia Business School who has spent her career studying choice – why it matters, how we choose and how we can choose better.

Iyengar is the inaugural S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the Management Division of the Columbia Business School and has taught on a wide variety of topics for MBA and Executive MBA students, including leadership, decision making, creativity, and globalisation, earning an Innovation in the Teaching Curriculum award along the way. She was also recently selected by Columbia University’s President’s Office to teach at the Global Leadership Fellows Program at the World Economics Forum in Geneva, Switzerland.

During her Ph.D. in social psychology at Stanford University, Iyengar became interested in how people make choices, particularly the importance and universality of choice in people’s lives. Her dissertation, entitled Choice and its Discontents, received the prestigious Best Dissertation Award for 1998 from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.

It is her passion for learning that led Iyengar down the extraordinary path of writing The Art of Choosing. Whether mundane or life-altering, choices define us and shape our lives. In her book, Sheena Iyengar asks the difficult questions about how and why we choose: Is the desire for choice innate or bound by culture? Why do we sometimes choose against our best interests? How much control do we really have over what we choose?

Iyengar’s award-winning research reveals that the answers are surprising and profound. In our world of shifting political and cultural forces, technological revolution, and interconnected commerce, our decisions have far-reaching consequences.