Anyone who makes decisions a part of their job—meaning, basically everyone—could learn a lesson from Daniel Kahneman. He was a groundbreaking psychology researcher, and his work revealed the extent to which all of us make our decisions based on biases built on erroneous judgments. He shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics and achieved fame as a pop psychologist with his best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow (Penguin Random House, October 2011).
Kahneman spent the first few years of his life on the run from the Nazis in occupied France. He’s one of several notable people in this issue whose stories were shaped by the trauma of the Holocaust. Martin Greenfield, couturier to the stars, learned to sew in the laundry room at Auschwitz. And Judith Hemmendinger, whose own father was murdered at Auschwitz, spent the immediate postwar period as the head of a school for boys orphaned at Buchenwald. One of her pupils was Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, who credited her for “directing us toward confidence and reconciliation.”
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The first female CEO of an NYSE-listed company and two lives that bookended an era
