Brain for Business

“Scandals regularly sweep through organizational fields: they wreak havoc in markets, vaporize billions of dollars in firm value, bring down giant corporations, get CEOs fired, alter the evolution of technologies, and trigger major changes in society. In spite of their significance for organizational life, scandals have received remarkably limited attention in management research.”   So says...

“The question of whether we have free will does not have a yes-or-no, all-or-none answer. Instead, we have degrees of freedom – an idea that is reasonably well captured… by a more commonsense understanding of the (still useful) notion of free will. That understanding entails, first, the ability to make choices – that we really can choose what to do. Our actions are not simply determined...

While accurate data is hard to come by, some sources claim that up 90% of starts up fail.  There can be many reasons for this including but not limited to the product or service not meeting market needs, the business model being flawed, or early-stage funding not materialising.  One potential issue not often discussed is the impact of employee commitment and the extent to which those wor...

Internationally, healthy adults are consistently falling below national and international recommendations for physical activity and failing to meet guidelines for dietary intake. Interventions to address behaviour change in these fields typically target clinically at-risk individuals, yet these do not always work and obesity levels in developed countries continue to rise with significant implicati...

In a 2019 article published in Business Horizons our guest today on the Brain for Business podcast, Dr Adrian Klammer, together with colleagues Thomas Grisold and Stefan Gueldenberg argued that organisations need to introduce a “stop doing” culture. But what is a “stop doing culture”? and what does it mean for leaders and their organisations? Originally from Austria, Adrian has a doctorate in busi...

Like many podcasts, Brain for Business is based around a conversation – a conversation between me as host and the various guests who join us. Each are experts in their fields and through the conversations that ensue we try to delve deep into their research as well as into their way of seeing and understanding the world around them, most particularly as it relates to the questions that they have ch...

I first came across the work of today’s guest one Monday morning at around 4am as I browsed the website for The Guardian newspaper on my phone. Unlike some people who make a point of waking that early in order to get a head start on the week, for me this was just another Monday morning when I woke far too early with far too many thoughts about work buzzing through my head. What perhaps made it wor...

Sometimes in life things go wrong… mistakes, accidents, even disasters will occur. From festivals that fail due to poor advance planning, product launches that simply fail to, well, launch through to public construction projects that seem to drag on for ever and end up costing much more than originally envisaged. And typically when things do go wrong there are calls for inquiries, accountability a...

A recent project in the US sought to map collective wellbeing. Supported by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Mapping Collective Wellbeing Project aimed to better understand the wellbeing ecosystem in the United States and globally. In so doing, the project aimed to address a number of key questions: “How do we co-create a vision and appreciation of the roles we play in working...

Over the last few years of the Covid pandemic we all became used to the idea of contagion and, in particular, how viruses spread through communities. But have you ever thought about how change – most especially behavioural change – spreads through networks, societies and, indeed, organisations? To explore this further we are joined on the Brain for Business podcast by one of the world's leading th...

It is now almost 20 years since the first podcast was launched, and if the available statistics are anything to go by, podcasts are definitely having a moment, with a reputed 2.5 million podcasts listed in Apple podcasts. When we think about who listens to podcasts, data from the US indicates that podcast listeners are 68% more likely to have a postgraduate degree, and 45% of podcast listeners hav...

We all know that to a certain extent cultures differ between countries. When we travel or work with people from different backgrounds we often gain unexpected insights into different traditions and different ways of doing things. Yet what is “culture”? How can it be understood? And how can leaders strengthen their Cultural Intelligence and that of the organisations they lead? To dig a bit deeper i...

While often seen as discrete and distinct phenomena, could it be that creativity and innovation are just variations on the same theme? Absolutely yes, says Dr Zorana Ivčević Pringle, and what is more rather than being purely logical and rational processes, both creativity and innovation are impacted by emotions in ways that many of us fail to recognise. Starting with a deceptively simple definitio...

Whether we like it or not (or recognise it or not!) in recent years we have all been subjected to various conspiracy theories. Whether it is claims that COVID-19 was developed in a lab and released on purpose, or assertions that the world is run by some kind of “Deep State” shadow government, erroneous conspiracy theories have had a significant and dangerous impact. This has been made all the wors...

The transition from individual contributor to manager is never easy. New managers need to take responsibility not just for their own performance, but also for that of team. They need to place less emphasis on doing, and much more on the essential skills of leading, influencing and communicating. Core to this is the development of a “leadership mindset”. But what is a leadership mindset? And what s...

“Human beings live in the realm of the possible as much as they do in the here and now of daily experience. We dream, hope, anticipate and create, exploring news spaces of possibility for ourselves and for others. These possibilities are not always appealing or exciting, however. Having too many options can be disorienting, innovating in unsustainable ways harmful, and spending time in virtual rea...

Our guest today on Brain for Business has recently written that “We are increasingly living in a society of falsehoods. News can be fake. Brands can be fake. Influencer endorsements can be fake. And “facts” are often fake, or “alternative.”"Yet what does all it mean for leaders and organisations? What role does social media play? And how can we start to see through the fog of fakes and falsity? Dr...

“Today we stand at the precipice of not one but three converging and potentially catastrophic long-term trends: climate change, globalization, and growing inequality. On their own, each of these makes the occasional crisis worse: We might see a more destructive hurricane, a more widespread financial meltdown, or longer or more violent civil unrest. Together, though, these trends magnify challenges...

As of 2022, the World Health Organisation estimated that More than 1 billion people worldwide are obese – 650 million adults, 340 million adolescents and 39 million children. Given that there are approximately 8 billion people on the planet that is equivalent to 12 and a half percent of the global population. This situation is made all the worse by the seeming impossibility in many developed count...

Letting our minds wander is more widespread than many people imagine: research has found that we can spend anywhere from 15% to 50% of our waking hours in a state of mind-wandering. Differences may depend on what we’re doing and difficulties with knowing when our minds are wandering: according to some reports, about half our mind-wandering episodes might slip past unnoticed! To find out more about...

One of our most popular episodes, this interview with Professor David Cropley was first released in January, 2021. Having finally succumbed to Covid and to mark the episode's second anniversary, we are issuing a special re-release. At its core, innovation is an innately human process involving individuals, teams and organisations striving to do things better and find better solutions. Consequently...

An MBA is seen by many aspiring executives as a rite of passage and a necessary step in order to develop their network, hone their skills and fine-tune their hard won business acumen. While once upon a time the top business schools tended to serve an almost exclusively male audience, thankfully these days business schools around the world make a significant effort to enhance the diversity of their...

In recent decades behavioural economics has emerged as a significant field in its own right. With a history going back almost a century and incorporating insights from Nobel prize winners such as Herbert Simon, Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler, behavioural economics seems to promise a meaningful alternative to the assumptions of rational human behaviour which underpin classical economics. Yet wh...

While in the Western world, gender has traditionally been viewed as binary and as following directly from biological sex, in recent years these views have started to change. Gender is now seen, at least by some, as less binary and more independent of sex. These changes are reflected in societal developments such as the growing support for transgender individuals and in new policies and practices,...

While we might all enjoy a magic trick or an intriguing sleight of hand by a magician, most of us prefer not to be actively deceived in our personal or professional lives. Yet despite repeated calls in recent years for greater authenticity in leadership, there are still leaders in who rely on the magician’s tools of deceit and manipulation to further their personal agendas. To better understand th...