"In today's business culture, expertise is currency. We celebrate mastery, reward pattern recognition, and prize leaders who can quickly distinguish signal from noise. But in doing so, we've created an unexpected trap for ourselves: The more you become "somebody" in your chosen field (recognized, accomplished, authoritative), the more your thinking tends to calcify, limiting your flexibility and creativity. The management scholar Erik Dane has called this problem "cognitive entrenchment," and the researchers Huy Phan and Bing Hiong Ngu have documented it widely across professions."
"Michelle Taite is a marketing executive and keynote speaker known for building brands at the intersection of creativity, technology, and emotional connection. She most recently served as chief marketing officer of Intuit Mailchimp. Previously, she was the VP of global marketing for Intuit QuickBooks at Intuit and held roles at Unilever and New Balance. She serves on the Association of National Advertisers Global CMO Growth Council and was named one of Business Insider's Most Innovative CMOs in 2023."
Expertise is highly valued in business, rewarded for mastery, pattern recognition, and rapid signal-versus-noise judgment. That valuation creates a trap: as recognized professionals accumulate status, their thinking can calcify and become less flexible. Cognitive entrenchment describes this tendency toward rigid mental models, limiting creativity and adaptive responses across professions. Researchers Huy Phan and Bing Hiong Ngu have documented the phenomenon widely, and management scholar Erik Dane named it. Michelle Taite exemplifies a marketing leader who blends creativity, technology, and emotional connection, holding senior roles at Intuit Mailchimp, Intuit QuickBooks, Unilever, and New Balance, and earning industry recognition.
Read at Harvard Business Review
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