The CIMBA MBA Class of 2010 and the Summer Session I MBAs

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I am always surprised at the number of you who read this column and even more surprised by the number of you who suggest it to others. One of the questions most often asked by new readers is: "Where do I begin? How do I catch up to the others who have been reading this column over the years?" Given the rate of change and development in the field, it is difficult question. More recently, my most common response has been David Rock's Your Brain at Work. Another interesting book, and the book for this month is Judith Horstman's  The Scientific American Brave New Brain: How Neuroscience, Brain-Machine Interfaces, Neuroimaging, Psychopharmacology, Epigenetics, The Internet,  and our own Minds are Stimulating and Enhancing the Future of Mental Power. 
 
Written for a non-scientific, intellectually curious audience, the book covers a wide variety of interesting brain topics including the general functioning of the brain, changing your brain, and memory. The illustrations provided in the book are very useful and exceptionally well done. In the process of elevating your general understanding of the brain, she takes you to the limits of neuroscience in such areas as stem cells, gene therapy, and nanotechnology. Horstman makes an effort to show you how the brain research is conducted in lay terms, and makes an effort to define its current limits and its future prospects.  With much of the book derived from articles published in the Scientific American and the Scientific American Mind (I strongly encourage you to get a subscription to the Mind at a minimum), it contains a very readable bibliography and glossary. Generally speaking, it is a good place to start for those newly interested in neuroscience and its contributions to NeuroLeadership.
 
As the book opens, she makes interesting point about the distance our understanding of the brain has traveled, noting that we have learned more about the brain in the past fifty years than in the previous fifty thousand. There is little doubt that the next decade alone may very well surpass those fifty years. She notes that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is spending nearly 20 percent of its budget on brain-related projects, with those projects cutting across a wide range of academic disciplines both inside (biology, biochemistry, and chemistry) and outside (engineering, computer science, and physics) the sciences.  (She did not list business - either David Rock or I will drop her note).
 
Much of the theory behind the CIMBA Leadership Development System focuses on the importance of attention, focus, and the ability to manage emotions. We are seeing very promising results flowing from coaching interventions where the goal is enhanced attention leading to self-regulation. In addition, it is becoming clear that meditation and mindfulness training can have significant impacts on attention and focus, leading to improved stress management, concentration, and productivity. In fact, the NIH is investing in a number of studies to better ferret out the affects of meditation and mindfulness on a variety of groups from prisoners to elementary students.  The notions presented in the book are very consistent with our observations within the System.
 
One of the issues with our System grows from the fact that it could used quite effectively as a "selection" rather than "productivity enhancement" tool. With relatively few places to go if the System would "reject" an applicant or current employee - business schools are just not equipped nor are ready for emotion-behavior learning - we are inclined to resist its use for that purpose. Horstman crosses a similar bridge in exploring neuroethics or in her words, the "dark side" of neuroscience and its applications.  She stimulates your thinking in such areas as privacy - "What kind of privacy safeguards would be needed if a machine could read your thoughts?", the use of psychopharmacological therapies in legal proceedings,  and the use of neuroenhancing drugs to elevate brain performance when competition is involved among others. In the words of Horstman, "Even as we forge ahead in this brave new world of neuroscience, the potential for abuse prompts caution. ...  [W]e know that the basis of what we each are is not all in our genes, but it is much more difficult to argue persuasively that it is not all in our heads."