The Inner Game of Breakthrough Performance

Hitendra Wadhwa, Adjunct Professor of Business, Management Division
The behavioral skills needed to create high performance at work are hard to teach, and hard to master. But what if we've been searching for the answer in all the wrong places? What if high-performance and exemplary leadership are less about "fixing" people by having them develop new skills and neural pathways, and more about "sparking" them by guiding them on tapping underutilized skills and neural pathways that they already possess?
Prof. Hitendra Wadhwa will tap his research, teaching and experiments at Columbia Business School and the Mentora Institute, which reveal very positive new findings on how professionals can accelerate their path to high performance by approaching this not as a trait to be acquired but as a state to be activated, and by shifting their focus from learning on the sidelines to leading in the flow of work. This work is the subject of Dr. Hitendra Wadhwa's article, Leading in the Flow of Work, published as the cover story in Harvard Business Review in Jan 2024.