Your comfort zone can be your shackles

The Life: Quants are people who like maths, struggle with ambiguity, have closed minds and do not like going out of their professional comfort zones. There are millions of them - and they need to change fast.

Paris de L'Etraz advocates employees thinking outside the box. Ravindranath K / The National

As a former investment banker who gave it all up to become a sports marketing agent, Paris de L'Etraz knows a bit about stepping out of professional comfort zones. Mr de L'Etraz, who is now a professor of entrepreneurship at IE Business School, explains why people who are so-called "quants" must start expanding their professional comfort zone.

In your doctoral research, you identified a type of person you call a quant. How did you discover them and who are they?

I was looking at the productivity issues in investment banking … and I realised there were certain people in the bank who I [called] quants. These were people who had a mathematical mentality, who struggled with ambiguity, who had a fairly closed mind, and didn't like going out of their professional comfort zone. A quant is a person who likes mathematics, but not all people who like mathematics are quants. A quant is someone who believes more information is more certainty. There are millions of people like that. Most people who are quants don't know it.

Why should quants change the way they are?

If your comfort zone as a person is small, you don't need to change. Be proud of it. But if your comfort zone professionally is small, you will have a problem in the next 20 years.

Why?

Companies today demand that people are able to get out of their comfort zones professionally. Six months ago, I spent a couple of weeks in Silicon Valley. I was with Google and Zynga and lots of these big companies out there. When they were listening to me, they said 'you know what? We don't have any quants at Google'. Even the nerd … has to be good at communicating, has to be good at selling themselves. He has to experiment and he has to be analytical. That requires a very big comfort zone.

So how do you increase the size of your professional comfort zone?

It is about thinking like an entrepreneur. You think out of the box. You are passionate about what you do. You are good at communicating and negotiating and you are analytical, because you have to be able to think strategically about things.

If it does not come naturally to you, how do you do those things?

You can learn them. This is the difference. If you have a personality that is very shy, learning to break out of that is very difficult. But I can teach you to express yourself better. I can teach you to start thinking out of the box. I can teach you to walk into situations that are outside of your comfort zone.

Is there anything people can do themselves?

Yes, every day you should try to get out of your comfort zone.

* Gillian Duncan