The Brains Behind Self-Management: Why We Are All Self-Managers

By Paul J. Zak

Synaptein’s Spring 2012 issue (published by Morning Star’s Self-management Institute) has an article by a Californian neuroscientist Paul Zak. Zak begins with Peter Drucker and provides a following quote from him:

“Managers needed to cultivate a culture that would meet the needs of the whole person, rather than view employees as a human ‘resource’.”

Taken from Drucker’s 1939 book that sounds still relevant… because not done yet in the majority of companies.

But Zak’s point is elsewhere. Guess what? When somebody (manager?) trusts us, it leads our brain to release the same hormone that sex or birth do. For those who wonder, it’s called oxytocin. It can’t be found in drugstores but… is in large supply the trust-based companies, aka, Freedom Incs. Read Dr. Zak below.

The last article my colleague Peter Drucker wrote for the Harvard Business Review before he passed away in 2005 was titled “Managing Oneself.”

Drink that in for a moment. The leading “social ecologist” of management thought that everyone needed to become his or her own chief executive officer. He said that this was done by identifying one’s strengths and values and then finding an organization where these would be rewarded.

You can read the full article here