The Four Intelligences of the Business Mind: How to Rewire Your Brain and Your Business for Success
Valeh Nazemoff with Erik Hille
CA Press (23014)

Four areas in which business leaders need to declutter, simplify, collaborate, communicate, and strategize better

In Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience, Michael S. Gazzaniga shares and explains the results of major research in cognitive neuroscience in recent years. I was especially interested in these key points: Both sides of the brain constantly interact while retaining their separate unique functions, the brain is prewired in many different ways, and — according to Gazzaniga — “the processes of underlying behavior, cognition, and even consciousness itself are highly modular and work in parallel.” If the mind is what the brain does, then the human brain has even more and more significant capabilities than once believed. Consider Howard Gardner’s concept of multiple intelligences.

With Erik Hille, Valeh Nazemoff has created what amounts to a primer for business executives on how to rewire their brain and, in process, rewire the business enterprise with which they are associated. She focuses on fore core areas where Transformation Intelligence has the greatest impact:

These are among the dozens of passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the scope of Nazemoff’s coverage:

o The Four Essential Transformational Intelligences for Businesses (Pages 3-4)
o he Executive Function of the Brain (5-8)
o The Four Essential Transformational Intelligences for Change (14-16)
o Neuroeconomics (17-24)
o Financial Intelligence (25-29)
o Re-Purpose Customer Intelligence (30-31)
o Customer Intelligence (38-39)
o Habits (43-45)
o Behavior and Predictive Analytics (45-47)
o How the Brain Perceives Visual Information (54-58)
o Opening Mind (73-77)
o Window of Possibilities, and, Recognizing Patterns (84-87)
o Delta of Possibilities (91-92)
o Strategy Mapping, and, Ingredients of a Strategy Map (96-106)
o The Output of a Strategy Map (111-113)

In my opinion, what we have in this volume is a 113-page primer on the basics of organizational and individual transformation. Obviously, need to have highly developed intelligence (both cognitive skills and reliable information) in four separate but related areas: finance, customer relationships, data, and what she characterizes as “mastermind” (on innovation) within a workplace culture in which personal growth and professional development are most likely to thrive.

To those in need of much greater development of these basic concepts, I highly recommend these three sources:

Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn’t Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science
Charles Jacobs

Beyond Performance Management: Why, When, and How to Use 40 Tools and Best Practices for Superior Business Performance
Jeremy Hope and Steve Player

Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage
Scott Keller and Colin Price