During the twenty-five years I've worked as a consultant, the main lesson I've learned is that the job of a manager is incredibly difficult. Even the smartest and most dedicated managers I've worked with spend sleepless nights wrestling with what their companies should do and how to get everybody on board to do it.
The unending succession of management initiatives doesn't seem to help much either. For me, learning what it takes for managers to be effective has largely been a process of trial, some error, and a lot of hard work in the trenches. It's not a new technique or fad that leads to lasting improvements in performance, I realized, but a fundamental rethinking of management, one that accounts for how our minds work.
But I never had a good scientific explanation for why this was true to offer my clients. While managers may trust experience, they trust hard data more. When I sold my firm and was sidelined with a non-compete agreement, I determined to come up with that hard data. After two years of research, I found it in a most unlikely place--the latest discoveries of brain science.
When I read about what scientists were learning from brain scans, everything came together. I then understood so much of what I'd experienced during my lifelong fascination with the mind, starting with one of my earliest memories.
I'm told that when I was five years, I asked how I could know that other people existed and weren't just figments of my imagination, a respected philosophical position I later learned was called solipsism. At twelve, I found Freud's notion that if we're conscious, we're neurotic, to offer some solace for teenage angst. It was comforting to know that I had lots of company.
But when I worked in a mental hospital for acute schizophrenics during college, I realized just how much the world is a product of our minds. One of my patients gave speeches to an unseen audience that could become testy at times, another marched up and down the hall all day long, repeating "red light, green light," and a third would often be commanded by God to smite one of his fellow men
Then there was Ralph. One night, he presented me with a convincing argument that I was the crazy one, not him. While I had to work, he enjoyed three meals a day, a roof over his head, and nonstop television, all courtesy of the state. It was hard to refute his position, until the day his inner voice ordered him to eat a tin can.
My psychology courses in behavioral science didn't explain any of what I experienced in the mental hospital. While I respect what pigeons can be trained to do, banishing the mind from any consideration of behavior didn't sit well with me. Maybe a rat could be trained with electric shocks to run through a maze, but my mind certainly would've rebelled after the first jolt.
Then I read the novel Murphy by Samuel Beckett for an English class. It told the story of a man voluntarily giving up his job in a mental hospital for the joy of being a patient. I realized then that stories captured the different way humans make sense of the world better than psychology.
After a brief and poorly compensated detour as an English professor, I joined the corporate world as a management trainer. While electric shocks weren't allowed, the approach to shaping behavior was similar. It didn't work very well, and nor did most of the prescriptions offered by the experts on how to manage.
It soon became clear to me that the focus should be on how we think about business, and how our thinking needs to incorporate how others think as well. Learning the techniques of time management didn't improve productivity, but addressing why we don't use such common sense approaches did. The key to improving performance is inside of our heads. All of my work since has been based on that insight.
The amazing recent discoveries of brain science have produced the hard data I was looking for to support my insight. All of us create our own unique version of events, our minds do most of their work unconsciously, and stories are how we make sense of the world. When we manage with this in mind, we become more effective.
Management Rewired explains our new understanding of the mind, and how it is transforming management. I wrote it so that managers will get the results they intend without having to suffer through trial and error. Hopefully, they will have fewer sleepless nights as well.
