Measure Your Mindset . Seed Your Success!

You have probably read the brouhaha surrounding the comments about “low-value human capital” uttered by the StanChart CEO Bill Winters. The bank said on Tuesday (19 May 2026) that it would cut about 15 percent of its corporate function roles by 2030, citing AI as the main driver for slimming its ranks. Yet, AI does not have to be your replacement. It can be your partner. Indeed, Bill Winters again, “Some roles will reduce in number, some will change, and new opportunities will emerge."

So, in Part One, I recounted how we discovered that only 13.7% of the respondents in our dataset could definitively be identified as having either the growth or fixed mindset, and the other 86.3% of them had what I would call the "Transitional" Mindset. Yet, this was not our biggest discovery! Diving into the data, we could see that even though a respondent scored an average of, say, 3.9, the dispersion of scores told us a different thing.

I didn’t start out to create an alternate logic to the idea of the fixed and growth mindset. In fact, I began with the same assumption that people were in fact either fixed or growth in their mindset. But, like all research, you allow the data to take you to your final assertion, and you do not bend it to conform to your hypothesis. That happened one day in 2014.