Managing brains, not bodies, in the knowledge economy

[Pho­to: Flickr user_DJ_, Bri­an Snel­son via Wiki­me­dia Commons]

This Out­dat­ed Approach To Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty Is Bad For Your Brain (Fast Company):

“Your car has parts that per­form spe­cif­ic tasks. The radi­a­tor cools the engine. The spark plugs ignite the gas. The intake man­i­fold dis­trib­utes air and gas even­ly to the cylin­ders. We think of a car this way because a car is a machine.

For most of the 20th cen­tu­ry, sci­en­tists mapped the brain in the same way…This machine par­a­digm for the brain is a mod­el of Indus­tri­al Age pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. We’re no longer liv­ing and work­ing in the Indus­tri­al Age—not by a long-shot—but we’re still oper­at­ing in ways devel­oped to suit that peri­od’s needs, not those of our own…In many ways, our brains are like five-year-old chil­dren, capa­ble of great bouts of ener­gy and learn­ing and cre­ativ­i­ty but then need­ing to nap, to be enter­tained, to run around and get out their ya-yas.

Today’s lead­ers and man­agers must rec­og­nize that in the mod­ern knowl­edge econ­o­my, they’re no longer man­ag­ing bod­ies but man­ag­ing brains.”

To learn more:

• To har­ness neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty, start with enthusiasm
• To boost cre­ativ­i­ty, com­bine sys­tem­at­ic dai­ly effort with diverse emo­tion­al states
• The Ten Habits of High­ly Effec­tive Brains