I’ve got a busy day today – 19th Jan, 2012.
I’m on Talk Radio Europe on 12.40pm (UK time), talking about the book, Taming the Pound [amazon-product]1848767528[/amazon-product].
Then at 6.30 I’m doing a talk to the London Branch of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, about financial decision making. It’s more geared to corporate finance, particularly personnel decisions, than to personal finance – but the principles are still the same. People in companies don’t really work out what they are trying to do, make decisions very fast mainly based on subconscious thinking and emotion, and then try to justify them with “logic”. It’s just that they usually have a better armoury of spurious maths and post hoc rationalising than people can manage for their own money decisions!
I’m doing a talk on a similar subject to the Reading branch of the Chartered Insurance Institute next week, on the 26th January at 12.30. The subject is the same, but the content is different.
That’s because the CIPD audience will be mainly people who run personnel and HR budgets, they are trying to get the financial people (the accountant, Chief Finance Officer etc.) to fund intangible things letter better appraisal schemes, management training etc. The CII audience will be people who can usually use maths and logic to work out rates of premium for things like car insurance.
The need to make financial decisions is the same and the fact that they often make decisions that are not the best they could have made is the same, but the way they usually go about making the decisions are quite different.
Another thing that is the same is that they all tend to think they alone are logical, and other people can’t think straight, which is the way that everybody thinks. So, because their typical idea of what is “logical” is quite different, each audience needs a different approach to help them to think through how they make decisions, and to allow them to make better decisions that will save their organisations money.
