Neuroscience in Business: Being Smarter in the Downturn

February 4th, 2009

Last night I heard a neuroscientist make a remark that has huge implications for 21st century businesses, ”For all the ways we know to use a tool, like a needle or a hammer, for example, we use the Wernicke’s area of the brain,” pointing to the area just above and behind his left ear. “But if you want to think of new ways to use a needle, you use the other side,” pointing above and behind his right ear.

Every business is challenged to rethink the way it uses tools, processes and other assets, to be sure. That’s challenging enough, you think?

Take a look at a few of the factors required in order for your brain – for customers’ and employees’ brains – to perform this all-important task.

The right and left sides of our brain are connected by the corpus collosum – a structure that is highly affected by a number of types of stress.

If your employee or customer is worried, frightened, tired, not getting enough exercise, hyped up on caffeine, or has any concerns for his/her status [rank on the social or corporate hierarchy], s/he won’t be able to take on a new question.

Because of the way the brain works, many types of stress decrease ingenuity when we need it most.

Already at work on that? Please share…

Filed under neuroscience in business | Comments (2)

2 Responses to “Neuroscience in Business: Being Smarter in the Downturn”

  1. Tom Fabrizio on February 5, 2009 9:49 am

    What comes first, the chicken [the organizational structure], or the egg [a person's behavior]? Perhaps it’s the wrong question. One affects the other so much – they become ONE. They can’t be treated as separate. This is my big challenge…

  2. Marsha Shenk on February 12, 2009 12:05 pm

    Hi Tom,

    Behavior is at least as influenced by Culture as by Organizational structure. In this moment of change, leaders have an opportunity to shift their cultures.

    Tools for doing that? New forums in which people can participate in new questions; new standards for efficacy, with clear means of measuring performance; new interpretations of what constitutes excellence, with new rituals for celebrating it.

    We come to be the way we are via 350,000 generations of group cooperation. We are designed to be pickled in the brine of culture. Leaders have a huge opportunity to design new cultures – people are crying for it

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