THIS IS MY 74TH BLOG ON UNDERSTANDING MONEY TOOLS
In this blog we are going to explore the very important
topic of “right and left brain” thinking and how it will affect us in choosing
a partner, partners or growing a company. I have been fairly heavily involved
with this topic since 1981-82.
We have heard the term right-brain or left-brain type of
person for years. How do we define these terms? Very concisely a left-brain
dominant person is associated with logic, numbers, analytics and reasoning. A
right-brain person is associated with music, creativity, emotion and seeing the
big picture in things.
These psychological differences were first presented by
Roger Sperry in 1981. Since then, there has been considerable dispute on any
accuracy between psychological and physical aspects of the brain. For this blog I am going to separate
the psychological from the physical matter, and only deal with psychological
consistencies I have witnessed through the years.
What got me onto this topic? A couple weeks ago I had coffee
with a new acquaintance who promoted himself as a successful individual
consulting for very small start-up companies, helping them grow and throw the
initial public offering stages (becoming a publicly traded stock company). My
intrigue in meeting was to see who this individual was, his capabilities, his
background, and his thinking process. A little background on this individual;
one major employer all his life, quite intelligent, retired, and
self-contained. As we left our coffee meeting I did my usual thing; summarize,
generalize, further analyze. With these observations I thought I could
compliment this individual with my background, however he would never permit me
into his world, and how different our thinking process was/is. This brought me
to this topic for discussion and blog.
Okay, let’s really start the basis for this blog. When
choosing partners, hiring employees or interviewing for a job position, it is
wise to know the people who you will be associating with from a psychological
standpoint. Above I mentioned the given traits for right and left-brain
thinkers. It is “very important” to be balanced, and I will give examples to
this below. Many companies, even large companies have gone through bankruptcies
because of these imbalances. It is so tempting to interview for a partner, see
his academic or professional strengths and say “yes” because you both think
alike. “Birds of a feather flock together.” Perhaps this is not good. You need a “compliment” to your
thinking process, not a “clone”.
Statistically it has been proven the best CEO’s are right
brain thinkers. These are individuals who can envision the “big picture”, where
the company should be going, and leave the details to the “rest of us”. Many
companies have an accountant running their companies, detailed people who put
bottom line first, not the big picture including marketing/sales or human
beings. Many of these companies end in failure. There is one individual, whose
name I won’t mention but you could Google him, who has/had an accounting
background and was hired as president or CEO for three or four airlines 20
years ago and bankrupted all of them.
He departed each airlines with hefty, gold plated retirement packages.
Amazing, the “good old boys” club exists!
Left-brain thinkers, which include myself, are analytics. We
have a tough time coming up with the initial ideas, but have no problem taking
the topic and evolving it into something meaningful. This type of person sees
the details, issues, problems that can exist or currently exist.
Many companies hire corporate psychologists. When I was
helping grow the oil/gas company Energetics, Inc. we hired an outside
consultant who was a psychologist who specialized in corporate work. We had a
wonderful company, great employees who would help one another at any needed
moment, and wanted the company to continue on that path. At that point we were
at approximately 200 employees. The psychologist would interview each
individual with the objective of finding problems, strengths, weaknesses, work
objectives, etc. This person also worked along with our human resource
department on the type of person we wanted in each department as a compliment,
left-brain/right-brain. The
psychologist was very acquainted with the term “Peter Principle”, and we wanted
to know the levels we could comfortably advance an employee. (We have covered
this terminology in past blogs.)
Friends of my wife and I in the late mid-1980s, were quite
successful. The wife happened to be a well-respected psychologist who specialized
in working with companies. She was the psychologist who worked with Braniff
Airlines, which failed. After it filed for bankruptcy she had mentioned to me
that one prime reason for failure was that they did not follow her
recommendations, and hired the same type of person over and over. You need to have balance in thinking;
right-brain, left-brain.
Now, here is the difficult part of this. Sometimes you don’t
see the value in different thinking processes, and it may be somewhat
uncomfortable. Best to give you an actual illustration. The wife who I
mentioned in the last paragraph asked if I would want to participate in one of
her all day, interactive seminars, at no charge to me. I accepted. It was a
wonderful experience and very informative. If you are growing a company or thinking of taking a partner
on, I strongly recommend finding something similar for yourself.
The first step was a very comprehensive and long
questionnaire I had to fill out at home prior to the seminar. The seminar was
in a comfortable but large hotel room with about 100 people in attendance. The
top three right and left brained people were separated out for an illustrative
work project. Unsuspecting, I was pointed out to be one of the top three left
brained thinkers out of 100 people in the room and a close friend who was the
CEO of a fairly large company was selected as one of the three right brained
thinkers. In this part of the
seminar each group of us was given a large “marker board” with the same topic
to work through and identify steps to resolutions. First, our two groups were
asked to leave the room and go to separate areas. We had 20-30 minutes to
outline how we were going to solve the problem/topic. Our group, the left-brain
analytics, had it outlined and defined in 10 minutes, and we were all in
agreement. Then, we had to come back into the seminar room and make our
presentation to the audience. The right-brained group, including my friend,
never had agreement on the topic, and their outline consisted of about 3 items;
the audience laughed. Not that ours was better, but different. Our presentation
was over-kill, detailed and long. The right-brain people could see the big
picture, but didn’t know how to go from A to Z.
One more illustration from this seminar and then we will
close this blog. In the same seminar we separated working with only one other
person, but of the opposite “type of brain thinking”. We were each given a
large piece of white paper, marker pens and the task was to draw a house in
conjunction with partner. We had
15 minutes to do this. The stipulations were that one person could draw only
one line, then the other person would draw the next line to construct the
house. Sounds easy, yes? Wrong. Almost every person in the room had a difficult
time working with their given partner. These people were all smart, the seminar
was quite expensive, why did they have problems, what happened? In my
situation, the first line I drew for the house was the base/floor or
foundation. The next line should be the walls, yes? Then, perhaps comes the
roof, then windows, doors, chimney and so on….logical to me. However, to my
partner and frustrating to me they put the roof on the paper before the walls,
then something else but not in order of my thought process and expectations. This was typical of everyone in the
room with some people getting so frustrated through this process they actually
quit working with their partners.
Wow, so simple and yet so complex; we can’t work
together. We think so differently,
but perhaps compliment each other if given the right work environment and
freedom. We need to learn to listen to others, and understand their thought
process.
I hope this blog gives you something to think about.
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