Management and the Brain Sciences: An Uneasy Alliance?

Abstract

Some 240 years ago, American revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine (2008) depicted the angst of his era with the words, "These are the times to try men's souls.” Today, countless managers also find themselves beset with a whole host of vexing issues that regularly try their mental and emotive spirits. Many of these matters are further complicated by the managers' own ill-fated efforts to cope with the rapidly fluctuating economic, social, political, and technological terrain.

Success in such a mutable landscape seems to favor those managers who can quickly diagnose, interpret, and act on emerging opportunities and deal with incipient threats. Taken together, all of these demands serve to lay great strain on a manager's cognitive, physical and emotional capacity. Additionally, much of their formal business education has ill-prepared managers to survive and thrive within such a confusing, topsy-turvy topography.

Modern brain science has the potential to offer a degree of relief to beleaguered managers. It has recently engaged in a comprehensive, lengthy, and costly effort to better understand how human brains and minds work. A small subset of researchers and practitioners has begun to focus on the linkages between management's issues and the research findings from the brain sciences. This paper will attempt to describe the current state of the relevant research, identify five relevant findings from an analysis of discovered patterns in the research, discuss each of the findings, consider limitations, offer some conclusions, and extend some recommendations for the future.