If you have read a new business book, done executive training or attended a leadership summit recently, you have probably seen a slide, diagram or animation of the human brain.
Excitement about neuroscience is high. Where it intersects with leadership studies, it is lighting up the prefrontal cortex of coaches, marketers, executives and, inevitably, a few charlatans and snake-oil salesmen.
Brain science talks were hugely oversubscribed at this year’s World Economic Forum, leading some management academics to mutter about the days when business professors, not scientists, were the Davos crowd-pullers. At one session, Tania Singer of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences revealed preliminary research that shows intensive exercises in empathy, perspective-taking and mindfulness can break selfish habits and change “the brain’s hardware” so people become more altruistic. Robert Shiller, an economist, told the same audience such results could shake the fundamental underpinnings of orthodox economics. The research has implications for management, too.