The Leading Brain: Powerful Science-Based Strategies for Achieving Peak Performance - Hardcover

Fabritius, Friederike; Hagemann, Hans W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 014312935X ISBN 13: 9780143129356

Verlag: TarcherPerigee, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

A cutting-edge guide to applying the latest research in brain science to leadership - to sharpen performance, encourage innovation, and enhance job satisfaction.

**Featured on NPR, Success, Investor Business Daily, Thrive Global, MindBodyGreen, The Chicago Tribune, and more**

There's a revolution taking place that most businesses are still unaware of. The understanding of how our brains work has radically shifted, exploding long-held myths about our everyday cognitive performance and fundamentally changing the way we engage and succeed in the workplace.

Combining their expertise in both neuropsychology and management consulting, neuropsychologist Friederike Fabritius and leadership expert Dr. Hans W. Hagemann present simple yet powerful strategies for:

- Sharpening focus
- Achieving the highest performance
- Learning and retaining information more efficiently
- Improving complex decision-making
- Cultivating trust and building strong teams

Based on the authors' popular leadership programs, which have been delivered to tens of thousands of leaders all over the world, this clear, insightful, and engaging book will help both individuals and teams perform at their maximum potential, delivering extraordinary results.

**Named a Best Business Book of 2017 by Strategy+Business**

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Friederike Fabritius is a neuropsychologist and a leading expert in the field of Neuroleadership. As an executive coach and leadership specialist, she has extensive expertise working with top executives from Fortune 500 companies. A sought-after keynote speaker, she has addressed large audiences at events hosted by prominent multinational corporations, including EY (Ernst & Young), thyssenkrupp, Trivago, and Audi.


Hans W. Hagemann, Ph.D., is managing partner/co-founder at the global leadership consultancy firm Munich Leadership Group, which counts Allianz Global Investors, Bayer, BMW, EY, Expedia, Montblanc, SAP, Siemens, and thyssenkrupp among their clients. He is a global expert on leadership and innovation who has led seminars, coaching sessions and in-depth workshops with top executives in more than 40 countries.

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CHAPTER 1

FIND YOUR SWEET SPOT

How Do You Gain the Right Mix of Neurochemicals to Perform at Your Very Best When You Need To? On May 15, shortly before dawn, Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr., wearing a new suit and carrying a metal box about the size of a large briefcase, took an elevator up ten stories,1 got off, and was promptly strapped into a padded chair by waiting attendants who were dressed in white coats. The area around him was extremely cramped, similar to what you’d find in a -typical commercial airline restroom. But Cooper, known as Gordo by his friends, wasn’t sitting in an airline bathroom. He was sealed inside a cone-shaped aluminum space capsule that was perched atop 200,000 pounds of extremely flammable liquid oxygen and was about to embark on a journey of 546,167 miles.2        The year was 1963, and astronaut Gordo Cooper was scheduled to be just the sixth American to venture into outer space. This was no joy ride. Several of the previous flights had encountered problems. Serious problems. A little more than a year earlier, Cooper’s colleague John Glenn narrowly missed being incinerated in the Earth’s atmosphere after his spacecraft’s heat shield had come loose.3 Despite the fact that the astronauts were all experienced pilots who had been chosen for their mental toughness, Cooper’s mission was bound to place even the hardiest fighter pilot under significant stress.        A series of holds in the mission’s countdown were agonizing even for the control room’s seasoned technicians. As Cooper was forced to endure yet another delay, doctors on the ground were closely monitoring his biomedical telemetry. What they saw from their readouts shocked them to the point of disbelief. Although it seemed almost inconceivable, astronaut Gordo Cooper was actually taking a nap!4

Outside a modest laboratory in Lille, France, hours after the workday had officially ended and more than a century before Gordo Cooper traveled into space, a solitary bearded man, dressed in a dark vest and jacket, could be seen pacing up and down a long corridor, deep in thought, betraying a noticeable limp, and occasionally jingling the keys in his pocket to provide a kind of rhythm to his ruminations.5        The man was Louis Pasteur, and his steadfast dedication to science and study revolutionized practices in both medicine and industry. Working with extreme caution, he never left anything to chance.6 For Pasteur, hitting his performance sweet spot required incredible patience and sustained concentration. A thoughtful, reflective man, he was well aware of the secret of his success: “My strength,” he explained, “lies solely in my tenacity.”7

THE PURSUIT OF PEAK PERFORMANCE No one would have confused cocky, clean-shaven Gordo Cooper with bearded, contemplative Louis Pasteur; nor could they have ever swapped jobs. Yet both were masters at reaching a level of excellence that we commonly refer to as peak performance. Pasteur’s peak performance led to groundbreaking discoveries in science and medicine. Cooper’s peak performance didn’t come while he was sleeping. The fact that he could sleep through the preparations for a dangerous journey underscored the wide range of differences in the conditions for when people perform at their best. Whereas Gordo had the temperament of a sprinter, Pasteur had the mind-set of a marathoner. Although Cooper slept peacefully inside the cramped confines of his capsule, which he’d named Faith 7, before his Atlas 9 rocket left the launchpad, his challenge and his crucial moment of peak performance were still to come.

THE U THAT MOTIVATES YOU Anyone who has ever held a tennis racket, wielded a baseball bat, or swung a golf club knows about the sweet spot, the place where the ball responds in the best possible way. All of us strive to find our sweet spot of performance, that zone where we’re at our most productive and our most effective. What’s more, most of us know it when we get there. But how do we get there? What does it take? Without knowledge about the brain and the ability to use this knowledge, opportunities to perform at our best are squandered and the potential for great achievements remains unfulfilled. The good news: The skills it takes to improve one’s mental game in business and in life can be learned, trained, and improved.        In 1908, two psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson, found that subjecting rats to mild electric shocks actually improved the animals’ performance in navigating a maze. But if the shocks were increased beyond a certain point, the rats’ ability to travel through the maze degraded rapidly. Instead of being focused and alert, the rodents would grow increasingly panicked and attempt to escape. Yerkes and Dodson referred to the electric shocks as “arousal.” We commonly call this “stress.”        The two psychologists were able to illustrate the relationship between arousal and performance on a remarkably simple graph that has come to be known as the Inverted U (see fig. 1). Peak performance comes at the top of the graph, the spot where the level of arousal is sufficient to provide optimal focus and attention. Without adequate arousal, we’re likely to feel bored or apathetic. And when arousal’s too high? Those are the instances in which our focus deteriorates into a situation of stress—or even worse, panic. Our pursuit of peak performance is a little like Goldilocks’s tasting of the Three Bears’ porridge. Our goal is to find a level that is neither too cold nor too hot but just right.        Although it’s useful to be able to have a way of visualizing peak performance, that’s obviously not the same as achieving it. To gain a better grasp of just what it takes to find and reach your sweet spot, it helps to understand how the brain is operating when you’re performing at your best—and at your worst.

THE ANATOMY OF AROUSAL The wiring in your brain isn’t really wiring at all but a series of signals that hop from one cell to another. Working together, these microscopic messengers are responsible for every action, reaction, and emotion that you experience, including the condition that Yerkes and Dodson called arousal.

NEUROTRANSMITTERS There are approximately 1 trillion nerve cells in your brain, each of which measures about one-hundredth of a millimeter.8 Physically, each nerve cell, known as a neuron, looks a bit like a splatter on your kitchen counter. There’s a blob in the middle with tiny tentacles of neuronal matter radiating from the center. Different neurons may have slightly different shapes and functions, but the basic kitchen splatter design is the same from one neuron to the next. Although these billions of neurons are tightly crowded inside your brain, their tentacles don’t physically connect. They maintain microscopic gaps called synapses and employ chemical messengers called neurotransmitters to cross the remaining distance. Like tiny cell phones, neurons are capable of both sending and receiving signals.

Where the Axon Is The senders are known as axons, and each neuron comes with only one. Yet it has plenty of dendrites, which, although they sound like members of an obscure religious sect, are actually neuronal receivers. The fact that the nerves don’t physically connect is a plus. This gives them a remarkable ability to create brand-new circuitry known as neuronal pathways without the need to get out a soldering iron or call an electrician. And like the path you make when you leave the sidewalk and cut the corner by crossing through a neighbor’s lawn, these neuronal pathways,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: TarcherPerigee
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 014312935X
• ISBN 13: 9780143129356
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Tarcher; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/search/tarcher?page=1&q=TARCHER; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY; New York; NY; 10019; USA
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