The Neuroscience of Leadership and Culture

We live in a world that at last is attempting to learn between disciplines: religion informing science, science informing business, business informing psychology, psychology informing marketing, marketing informing technology, among others.

A few years ago, Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence and many other leadership books, gathered together a group of physicists, Buddhists, psychiatrists and neuroscientists so that they could learn from each other about how the mind works. Each year in Australia well-known CEOs and board members gather for two days in retreat with Sogyal Rinpoche (author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying) to learn about the Buddhist philosophy, focusing on how to calm their minds more effectively so that they can think more innovatively and be more effective leaders for their people.

Harvard and Insead Business Schools talk about the two most potent tools of the 21st Century being intuition and meditation. The Harvard Business Review writes about executives and their new attention deficit trait—overloaded circuits in their minds. With the use of functional MRI and other technologies, we are able to glean more information about how the mind works, helping us to understand how behaviours can be changed and innovative thinking can be improved in our organisational cultures.

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