Publications
Publications
- 2022
- Foundations and Trends® in Marketing
Open or Closed? Your Mind, Your Decision!
By: Gerald Zaltman
Abstract
The marketing profession faces challenging times. The shelf life for decisions and the half-life of the knowledge used, are becoming shorter and shorter while the problems addressed are becoming messier. Fortunately, the emergence of what I call the “prosthetic age” is enhancing our ability to identify, collect, store, retrieve, and process information. These enhancements require open-mindedness, a task not for the faint-of-heart. An open mind has the discipline, courage, and humility to examine how it works and is willing to make improvements. It embraces curiosity, befriends ignorance, and finds comfort with ambiguity. It allows its intuitions about errors and questions the scope to operate in other fields. It also cultivates wisdom. These qualities or tools, the focus of this paper, create a readiness to change ways of thinking which may lead to new thoughts. A closed mind shrinks from these activities or performs them in a perfunctory way and generates fewer ideas with which to innovate.
Keywords
Citation
Zaltman, Gerald. "Open or Closed? Your Mind, Your Decision!" Special Issue on Reflections of Eminent Marketing Scholars. Foundations and Trends® in Marketing 16, nos. 1-2 (2022): 300–307.