Executive MBA Videos

Robert Edgar Piret: Neuroscience and leadership behaviour

European Executive MBA Faculty member Dr. Robert Piret introduces listeners to the very controversial subject of the Cognitive Neurosciences.  What impact do they have on Business Management?

Hi, my name is Robert Piret. I’m a professor of Management at ESCP Europe in Paris, France.  When I was asked to talk about cognitive neurosciences for five minutes, it was sort of like, as we say in France, putting Paris in a bottle. But I’ll do my best.

This scenario that I teach at the Executive MBA programme, and also in Executive Management for people who are interested in out-of-the-box thinking about subjects in general, happens to be particularly relevant from that point of view because it has to do with human nature and the way the mind works. There’s an absolute revolution taking place right now in the area of cognitive neurosciences because for the first time we’re actually able to look inside the brain and see how the brain is functioning pretty much in real time. FMRI*, PET**, EEG***, technologies like that are becoming more and more efficient and with a lot of software around it that allows us to analyse what’s really going on. This is going to have an impact on a lot of different levels, but among others in the area of business management. People are starting now to look at its applications in the areas of finance and marketing, cooperation and leadership, and it’s spawning new fields like neuroeconomics, neuromarketing, neurofinance, etc.

Cognitive neuroscience in general – and I don’t try to turn people into brain surgeons – but there are a certain number of general things now that we can observe about the brain, that we didn’t really know about before. This area is dispelling a lot of previous common knowledge that once your brain is mature, all you do is lose brain cells – well, now we know that the brain can actually regenerate and does actively regenerate nerve cells, which is good news –, that we think in a language – like we think in French, or we think in English, or we think in German, or Japanese, or Chinese, or whatever – that’s not really true, we think in a sort of lower-level language, that we often refer to as mentalese, and spoken languages have an impact maybe at a later stage.

All of our brains are different. We’ve had a tendency to think of the brain as a piece of meat loaf, homogeneous, and that’s how we visualise it typically, while actually it’s a composite of a lot of different modules that interact with each other, and these modules are very specialised. But one of the things that the brain does now that we know and that we’re able to observe and study, is how the brain filters, compares, categorises. Our brains are categorising machines: in fact, a brain has a hard time thinking in terms of variation. Also, the brain is a cognitive miser – it always seeks and, from an evolutionary point of view, it’s been selected for its ability to economise. The brain uses 25-30% of all the energy that your body uses at any given time. And all these types of factors have a very deep impact on our understanding of the way the mind works and what human nature is, and therefore, it has an impact on management.

The most popular area of management training is probably the area of leadership. Everybody wants to be a leader. Who wants to be a follower? However, most of the theories that instruct us on what to emphasize for leaders – coming largely from the psycho-social area – leave us with ideas like: “You need to inspire a shared vision, you need to challenge the process, enable others to act, models away, even encourage the heart”, which are all very good things. You can hardly argue against them. On the other hand, for the follower, what we found is that they are not necessarily very engaging. So where neuroscience can be instrumental is in looking at it in a somewhat different way, in a much more empirical way, much less deductive, and in looking at how people actually experience what’s going on, by observing what’s going on in their brain. And it’s not necessarily going to contradict what has been said before, on the other hand it may change a little bit the emphasis. For instance, people at Arizona State have shown that the so-called visionary leaders have a tendency to use very actively their visual cortex back here, as compared to other people. So, how do we deal with that? How do we use visualisation to try to promote change in people, for instance? Leadership has to do with change, of course. For instance, how do you create insightful experiences for people? That’s been shown to have an impact on the way in which people act and the way in which the brain actually rewires itself. How do you reduce discounting in the future? Leaders have a way to discount futures less than other people, in general. So how does that impact our way of thinking about leadership and getting followers to do what we hope they’re going to do. How do you deal with things like dysrationalia, where even people with a very high IQ, either because they’re cognitive misers or because they don’t have certain tools, don’t actually carry through activities in a rational way.  How do you create, for instance, chunks of anticipation? Anticipation has been shown to be a great predictor in terms of what people are going to do in the future. You can’t give them anticipation all the time, like in a movie, with everyone laughing all the time in a comedy. You have to give people a chance to slow down a little bit before the next punch line. So how do you actually do that, and how is that going to impact on your leadership skills? The importance of branding: branding has been shown to have an actual physiological component to it.

So, cognitive neuroscience is coming out of the road like a Big Mack truck, and there are basically two ways to deal with it. It’s going to happen, whatever the case. And it’s very controversial – a lot of the results that are coming out, some people are maybe going to have a little difficulty dealing with. So there are basically two ways to deal with it. We can either ignore it and do as we’ve been doing all along and try to hope it goes away, or we look at it, pay attention to it and find an ethical, moral way to deal with it.

*Functional magnetic resonance imaging
**Positron emission tomography
***Electroencephalography

Robert E. Piret's resumé.
Robert E. Piret's publications.