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ReWiring the Corporate Brain

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ReWiring the Corporate Brain

Using the New Science to Rethink How We Structure and Lead

Berrett-Koehler,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Text available

What's inside?

Before you can change your company, you’ve got to change your mind.

Editorial Rating

5

Qualities

  • Comprehensive

Recommendation

If you’re looking for a philosophical, out-of-the-mainstream approach to restructuring your company, author Danah Zohar offers it. She presents an exhaustive, if at times repetitive, case for replacing inflexible, old-line companies with more agile, quantum organizations. Problematically, Zohar devotes too many words to theory and not enough to practical steps for restructuring, and her book is light on examples of companies that have successfully used quantum theory to reorganize. Still, her underlying case is strong. Anyone stuck in a staid bureaucracy would prefer a company where assumptions are actively questioned. To her credit, Zohar offers a starting point for the difficult task of streamlining stodgy organizations. getAbstract recommends her ideas to any manager seeking an unusual and thoughtful look at corporate restructuring.

Summary

The Reality of Change

Corporate executives and high-paid consultants love to tout processes of change, such as restructuring and reengineering. But most corporate change is superficial, a rearranging no more significant than shuffling furniture in a room. True transformation requires executives to rewire their brains - to rip out the old wires and completely change the way they think.

Because corporations organize humans, they operate on the same levels as humans. People have three levels: mental, emotional and spiritual (which doesn’t necessarily refer to religion). Most attempts at change aim at only one level. To transform an organization successfully, an effort to change must focus on all levels. This reflects the holistic nature of the world acknowledged by 20th-century science. People don’t consist of compartments titled "Mind," "Heart" and "Spirit," nor should a company be divided into "Product Development," "Marketing" and "Finance." A corporation must nurture all three types of thinking - mental, emotional and spiritual.

Adding Meaning to the Hierarchy

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs divides human requirements into basic needs and growth needs. Basic...

About the Author

Danah Zohar  , a management consultant and lecturer, is the author of The Quantum Self and The Quantum Society. She has a bachelor’s degree in physics and philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and did postgraduate work at Harvard. She lives in Oxford, England, where she teaches in the Leading Edge course at Oxford Brookes University and in the Oxford Strategic Leadership Program at Oxford University’s Templeton College.

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