Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn't Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science Summary:
By Charles S. JacobsPublisher: Portfolio Hardcover Number Of Pages: 224 Publication Date: 2009-05-14 ISBN-10 / ASIN: 159184262X ISBN-13 / EAN: 9781591842620
Product Description:
How brain science can help us make smarter management decisions Businesspeople are taught to make decisions with facts and logic and to avoid emotional bias. But according to the latest research, we almost never decide rationally, despite thinking that we do. Our experiences carry an emotional charge, encoded in the synapses of our neurons. And when we try to deny what our emotions tell us, we lose what we've learned from the past. That's just one of many recent discoveries that help explain why management is so challenging. As Charles Jacobs explains, much of the conventional wisdom taught to managers is not only inadequate, it produces the opposite of what is intended. The better path is frequently counterintuitive. For example, it turns out that pay doesn't really drive performance. When we do work that's inherently engaging, the neurotransmitter dopamine is released, creating feelings of pleasure not unlike a cocaine high. But when we work primarily for money, the dopamine isn't triggered and it's harder to stay motivated. Once we understand the lessons of neuroscience, we can create more effective strategies, inspire people to maximize their potential, and overcome the biggest hurdle to improving business performance-making change stick.
Summary: Not Rocket Science, but Good Brain Food
Rating: 4
In "Management Rewired" Charles Jacobs aims to debunk popular management wisdom using brain science. Many of the concepts aren't necessarily new. For instance, many agree that money is not a very good motivator. Jacobs explains why using neuroscience. An overarching premise of the book is that people are not machines. They have minds of their own and their decisions are shaped significantly by emotions. In fact, everyone has his/her own version of reality. So, simply employing "logical" means like providing positive or negative feedback to encourage or discourage behavior does not have the intended consequences. When people are confronted with negative feedback they get defensive and sometimes even aggressive. They come up with their own reasons for why the boss is spewing such nonsense. Often they not only repeat the "offending behavior," but do so with increased vigor and frequency. Conversely, when people are rewarded, their intrinsic motivation decreases in favor of the extrinsic reward. When the extrinsic reward is not as large/frequent as expected, performance becomes worse. So what is the solution? According to Jacobs, it's not about forcing, but about convincing. We actually need to change the way people think about their world. We need to create an environment that has people select the behavior we desire. Easier said than done, huh? Actually, Jacobs provides some methods for doing so including the use of metaphors and stories. You'll need to read yourself to find out more. For a book that on the surface seems like it would contain some heady material, it's actually a fairly easy read. The author does a fine job of distilling the brain science concepts in an understandable and even entertaining way. Although you may not agree with everything, the book will challenge some of your beliefs and make you think. Some of the suggestions, if practiced, will make you a better manager and leader. Nick McCormick, Author, "Lead Well and Prosper: 15 Successful Strategies for Becoming a Good Manager."
Summary: this is a seminal book and must reading
Rating: 5
The brilliant and absolutely original point of the recently released book "Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn't Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science" by Charles Jacobs is to introduce the role that "story" should play in contemporary management theory and practice. So, if you are a "smoke stack" 19th century style manager screaming orders at recalcitrant underlings who, for some unfathomable reason (to you), keep failing to implement your vision of robotically goose-stepping off to greater bottom-line efficiency, you'd better get this book. It's going to revise your flat-earth vision and save you from falling off the edge. But if you are currently getting most of your information off the web,
you have a cell-phone that has more applications than your old desk-top computer, you are completely comfortable in a multi-cultural, global workplace and you're firmly rooted, both technologically and mentally, in the 21st century, you'd better get this book. It's going to do for your career what GPS can do for your car. Jacobs debunks a bunch of motivational myths that still lurk in the consciousness of us all. Among the most prevalent of these is the old negative reinforcement strategy parodied in the dictum: "the flogging will continue until morale improves." Negative reinforcement produces negative results and Jacobs documents why. Enlightened positive reinforcement techniques? Studies show that even the carrot of salary increase has a limit to its effectiveness. Both the carrot and the stick have been superceded as management tools and neuroscience explains why. Even the ostensibly neutral mechanism of "feedback," it turns out, is out of date. Try replacing feedback, both positive and negative, with the Socratic method of posing questions to employees. It's the high road to finding out what stories those brain bearing humans you're trying to motivate are telling themselves about their role in the workplace Sounds simple--but before this book, who knew exactly why? Another key point of the book: Managers should abandon the prima donna conception of self that they lead by the sheer power of their personality. Perhaps some still subscribe to a Dale Carnegiesque strategy of how to win friends and influence people, but Jacobs points out that people ultimately follow story not personality. This book dispels the myth of cult of personality. Spielberg may be a personally charismatic but who among us has ever met him personally? We pay our money to see the work of a master storyteller. Personality may talk but story walks and it's the latter that we follow. Give people a good story about what they are trying to accomplish and then get out of the way. Jacobs documents how the story motivated person works harder, is more creative and ultimately more dedicated to the task at hand. The scholar Joseph Campbell called it the power of myth; the more commercial minded Hollywood calls it weekend box-office. It's a fact: the most powerful motivational force in human history is story. One need only to look at the great religions or the propaganda practices of the politicians in the media to see that.
Jacobs is on to something. You think you know what a story is? You probably don't know from the point of view of your brain. The reality, as Jacobs demonstrates, is that story speaks to both halves of our brain: the analytical, logical part which can break things down into component parts ad infinitum and the emotional, intuitive part that needs to see the forest before it counts the trees. Evolution explains why and that most evolved organ of our body is our brain. Information, as we know in the digital age, may be broken down ad infinitum into binary bits or bites of data. Our brain, however is not a computer; it's more holistic. It intuits the whole rather than bean-counting the sum of the parts. Can you guess what this means? You guessed it--the brain is hard-wired for story. Any soft-ware motivational strategy that ignores this fact just isn't going to run very well is it? Our brain doesn't need to know every fact about anything to draw conclusions; we do, however, need to know how to organize facts into a greater pattern called the story. Perhaps the most surprising lesson of "Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn't Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science" by Charles Jacobs is reserved for those non-management employees, that is, for most of us who work for a living. If your boss is a practitioner of what I call "The Adolph Hitler School of Management," in which your function is to "only follow orders," you should buy this book, read it, and then pass it on the your own personal Adolph. It will provide he / she with a compelling argument of why they should get off your back and stop meddling in the process of doing the job for which you were hired. They may even come to understand why you need to be treated like a competitive, cooperative, and ultimately "human" being. This book will teach them why. Thinking that a book about neuroscience is going to be something to slog through as you resist the temptation to pick up the guilty pleasure of beach reading this summer? Wrong. It is a great read and doesn't require much of a time commitment either. Jacobs is a consummate storyteller and there is much to learn about the art of telling a story from him. People should carry around this latest addition to what's really happening in the workplace like the Chinese once carried around Mao's "Little Red Book." It just might cause a revolution in the flagging sagging American capitalist economy that's needed today.
Summary: Trust me, I'm a scientist
Rating: 2
Different books strike a different balance between scientific knowledge and applications. This one is writen by a succesful consultant, and is at the management applications end of the spectrum.
Summary: An entertaining spin on familiar management maladies
Rating: 5
Most of us want to be good people managers, but we just don't always understand when people don't get our intent. In his book, Management Rewired, Jacobs deftly blends studies from a mongrel mix of his own consulting experience, classic literature and findings from the field of brain science using fMRI. Through the eyes of neuroscience, Jacobs weaves a compelling story, which shows that what we think is the right course of action from a common-sense perspective is often counter-intuitively the wrong one. Jacobs spins a narrative filled with entertaining and diverse examples that stand common management axioms on their head. It is a pleasure of a book to dive into and a useful tool for any would-be influencer or anyone who cares about change at an individual or organizational level. This book is ideal reading for forward thinking managers who want to manage their people not just their tasks.
Summary: Why "we need to rethink everything we thought we knew about management"
Rating: 5
In recent years, a number of books have discussed recent research in neurological science and its relevance to traditional theories about knowledge and how we process it. Among the many revelations, Charles Jacobs notes in the Introduction to this book, "perhaps the most surprising discovery has come from mapping the path information travels from our sense organs to our awareness of the world we live in. Not only are the perceptual areas of the brain involved, so are the areas responsible for our memories, our feelings, our beliefs, and our aspirations. Our minds aren't objectively recording our experience of the world; they're creating it, and the creation is influenced by everything elder going on in the brain. Each of us lives in a mental state of our own making...Rather than sharing the same world, we all inhabit a world that is uniquely our own." That has serious implications for those entrusted with management responsibilities "because we are not managing in a physical world but in a mental world, much of what is taken for granted as the right way to manage is actually the opposite of what we want to do. But to be more effective requires only a simple shift in perspective." How so? "Instead of seeing the world through the lens of Newtonian mechanics, we start seeing it as a process of natural selection. Rather than viewing people as inanimate objects, we recognize that they're thinking beings acting of their own volition. Because of the way the brain is organized, if we can keep this perspective in mind, we'll know the right things to do." Jacobs asserts that "much of what is taken for granted as the right way to manage is actually the opposite of what we want to do," that the world we experience exists only in our heads, our thinking is never objective, and our emotions lead to better decisions than our logic. Given that, what specifically does he recommend to his reader? 1. Leverage the mind to stop doing what doesn't work (and never will) so that it can concentrate on doing what does work. There should be continuous improvement of what is most important. 2. Stop offering feedback to direct reports. It is usually ignored and often resented. Instead, ask questions, listen intently to responses, and then repeat them back in your own words. 3. Workers appreciate recognition much more than they do rewards. In fact, rewards frequently diminish rather than increase their motivation. 4. Eliminate preoccupuation with short-term goals because they are distractions; focus on achieving long-term objectives. 5. Anticipate the future by identifying -- and preparing for - the most likely contingencies. That will help to make better decisions, and to influence other people to do what must be done in preparation for a future that is never predictable but nonetheless. The lessons of brain science have far reaching ramifications, but with immediate practical applications. 6. Consciously use natural selection as a "lens" through which to view your experience. "All of a sudden, you'll see things differently. You'll start to realize how much of what you do is a function of your relationships with others and how much of what they do is a function of their relationships with you." Using it as a lens will also serve as an alert to how much we're a product of our environment and how wee can shape it to our advantage. Jacobs makes a compelling argument that humans cannot possibly have the direct knowledge of the physical world they think they do. All that can be known is the representation of it in the brain in the form of ideas, "so the world we experience is mental, not physical." We all see it differently. Therefore, the challenge for transformational leaders is to change how others think, to rewire their minds, and one of the most effective ways to do that is "to package the right kind of ideas into a story and to effectively communicate it to the organization." On Page 185, Jacobs cites the example of Henry V, presumably Shakespeare's Henry V, as a "template for what a transformational leader needs to do in the corporate world." More recent exemplars include Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Kennedy. "Perhaps because they knew what it meant to be human and fallible, these leaders, with very different styles, communicated ideas that took people beyond themselves to accomplish more than they ever thought possible. That's the kind of transformation organizations need and people long for." It will not occur unless and until executives rethink everything they think they know about management. The latest developments in brain science require a significantly new understanding of how the mind works that needs to be incorporated into everyone's thinking about business, especially among those responsible for supervising others. In this brilliant book Charles Jacobs explains how organizations can become more focused and efficient as well as how they can create a sustainable advantage. He book offers an integrated set of practices by which to rapidly transform people so that superior performance results in improvement in the bottom line that will not just be incremental, but a "quantum leap."
