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From the Poker Table to a Seat at the Executive Leadership Table
Flip the table on work and life while building crucial leadership skills
Kellogg Executive Education and the Kellogg Center for Executive Women are partnering with Poker Power to offer a unique and highly innovative program designed for mid- to senior-level executives. Through the game of poker, participants will learn key leadership skills in an educational, supportive, engaging and entertaining environment.
Grounded in our faculty’s expertise, the program content will address everyday matters such as decision-making, negotiation, emotional intelligence and nonverbal communication. These topics lie beneath the surface in a game of poker and successful players know how to use them to their advantage. Executives deal with these same issues throughout their careers and can also learn to leverage them for their own success. Through a highly interactive approach, participants will discover how to enhance their careers by learning to:
- Take risks
- Be aggressive
- Step outside their comfort zone
- Recognize biases
- Conquer fear
- Avoid decision making traps
- Understand their decision's long-term impact
- Be aware of emotional contagion
- Improve probabilistic decision-making skills
- Recognize the importance of emotional intelligence
- Overcome confirmation bias
- Say no
“Not only have I learned a new skill and gained a ton of new insights into how to make better decisions and be the best version of myself, but it has also been awesome to learn that so many other executives struggle with the same things I do, such as a lack of confidence.”
Past Participant
Incentives available for groups and teams of four or more attending open enrollment programs. Learn more
Personal Consultation
Please contact us to schedule an advising session
Who Should Attend
- High potential and senior executives committed to supporting the development of women leaders in their organization
Key Benefits
- Learn to reframe your thinking and engage critical skills and strategies to advance in your career
- Discover how to be a more effective decision-maker
- Develop your emotional intelligence
- Become a more strategic negotiator
- Understand how basic math and probability can help to make more informed decisions
Program Content
Please note: no prior poker experience required.
Decision-making
- Evaluate the decision-making process
- Accurately assess risk
- Gain insight into decision-making biases
Emotional Intelligence
- Develop greater self-awareness and insight
- Learn how to read other people’s emotions
- Develop skills to better manage your own emotional reactions
Negotiation
- Become a more strategic negotiator
- Build a BATNA to obtain better negotiation outcomes
- Evaluate the weakness of your opponent’s BATNA
- Learn how to set aggressive goals when you negotiate
Regret
- Recognize key drivers of regret and be better positioned to make better choices
- Gain an understanding for how inaction leads to greater regret than action
- Explore the impact of counterfactual thinking on feelings of regret
Foundations of Finance
- Explore probabilistic thinking, distributions and the hot hand fallacy
- Discuss the concept of negative variance and the difficulty that people have adjusting when outcomes are “wrong”
Faculty & Instructors
Gail Berger - Academic Director; Clinical Associate Professor of Management & Organizations; Deputy Director, Center for Executive Women; Associate Professor of Instruction, Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, McCormick School of Engineering
Maria Konnikova - a New York Times best-selling author, journalist, and professional poker player
Victoria Medvec - Adeline Barry Davee Professor of Management & Organizations; Executive Director of the Center for Executive Women
Mitchell A. Petersen - Glen Vasel Professor of Finance; Director of the Heizer Center for Private Equity and Venture Capital
Brian Uzzi - Richard L. Thomas Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change Co-Director, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
2025 Session
|
February 5-7 & February 10-13, 2025 Start: February 5 at 9:00 AM End: February 13 at 11:00 AM
Program: Poker Tournament: This Approval Program is limited to individuals with specific business experience. All applications will be subject to review and approval from the program’s Academic Directors. |
$8,400 |
Non-Discrimination Statement
Northwestern University does not discriminate or permit discrimination by any member of its community against any individual on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, national origin, ethnicity, caste, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, parental status, marital status, age, disability, citizenship status, veteran status, genetic information, reproductive health decision making, height, weight, or any other classification protected by law in matters of admissions, employment, housing or services or in the educational programs or activities it operates. Harassment, whether verbal, physical or visual, that is based on any of these characteristics is a form of discrimination.
Northwestern University complies with federal and state laws that prohibit discrimination based on the protected categories listed above, including Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits discrimination based on sex (including sexual misconduct) in the University’s educational programs and activities. In addition, Northwestern provides reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants, students and employees with disabilities and to individuals who are pregnant.
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