CHAPTER 1
Why You Need To Use Both Sides Of Your Brain
“When faced with a storm, a tree that doesn’t bend becomes wood.”
—African proverb
We are living in transformative times for the entire world. There are overt and covert changes taking place to government structures, financial paradigms, social norms, industry composition, and geopolitical relationships. This is the perfect storm for breakdowns of long-established systems.
No one alive or in leadership has simultaneously experienced what has occurred in the first half of 2020. Events like a global pandemic, worldwide economic shutdown, demonstrations and riots lasting months across most of the cities in America and the world, and new protocols for resuming business are creating a new playbook for leading through a crisis.
Psychologists would inform us that any one of these circumstances would challenge our ability to cope because we are in deep survival mode. At the base of our head is a special location, the amygdala, from which chemical reactions emanate to deal with these circumstances. When we have an amygdala hijack, we revert to examining our world and actions, and the instinctual question of “How can I be safe?” dominates our decision-making and behavior.
Fight, flight, and freeze strategies are at the top of the list in the midst of uncertainty and form the first phase of our response. The quicker we move through this phase, the greater our chances for assessing potential options to create a highly functioning future. The number and depth of the neural connections in the frontal portion of the brain, where you do your best thinking, evaluating, and understanding, will determine your ability to thrive in the unfolding new world.
This book shows how leaders, when faced with complex business challenges, applied cognitive diversity that delivered optimal financial and organization results. Six of the chapters will highlight a factual story of a leader applying a left-, right-, or whole-brain solution to resolve their circumstances. Chapters three through nine will also refer to a thought leadership source that validates the results achieved by the leader.
This information will be relevant to two groups of readers: the owners and leadership of an organization, and the emerging leaders who want to avail themselves of all possible tools that will help them thrive regardless of the circumstances they face.
A surprising statistic from a study conducted by Accenture Strategy: 89 percent of C-Suite executives have degrees in left-brain directed fields such as engineering, finance, and accounting.
Importantly, there is a difference between left-brain thinking and right-brain thinking. In 1990, Hermann Global, an Inc. 500 firm
