We spend the majority of our waking hours at work, commuting to and from work, or trying to forget about work. Our success at our jobs, or lack of it, determines the material quality of our lives, our freedom to control our own destiny, and the psychological state with which we approach activities outside of work.

Because of the central role work plays in life, rightly or wrongly, I’ve devoted mine to improving the conditions under which we perform our labor. The discoveries of cognitive neuroscience are tremendously useful in that regard. They teach us how to improve the performance of organizations and, dare I say, how to make work more fun.

The latest lessons highlight the importance of relationships. Because we all perceive situations differently and make our decisions emotionally rather than logically, conflicts are inevitable and costly. When managers and employees don’t see eye to eye, productivity suffers. When we fail to appreciate the perspective of our customers, sales, revenues, and profits all decrease.

But neuroscience doesn’t just identify the problems, it offers solutions as well. It demonstrates that questions summon forth more engagement than declarations, that stories are more persuasive than arguments, and that big ideas have the power to change the world. Taking the lessons of this new science to heart makes us more successful at working through people to get things done.

Life outside of work is all about relationships as well. Whether with our families, the airline gate agent assigning us a center seat, or the police officer pulling us over for speeding, our facility for managing human interaction determines how much peace we enjoy at home, the elbow room we have on a five hour flight, and the percentage of our income lost to traffic fines.

The ideas we learn rewire our brains, changing the way we operate. Knowing its impact on the bottom line, the corporate world devotes significant resources to teaching managers how to improve relationships. In our personal lives, we should be just as focused on proactively and intelligently managing our interactions with others.

Life’s better when we all just get along.

Sure, there are always opportunities, if the wolves aren’t yet at the door, for those willing to take a risk. While everyone else is being tight-fisted, you can get a great deal on that new Cadillac Escalade you’ve been lusting after. If all of your competitors are cutting back, a well-timed investment in marketing can help your company gain share.

But fearful times have a tendency to bring out the worst in people. The emotion-generating amygdala starts pumping cortisol into the system, slowing our thinking and narrowing our vision. Just when we need to be at our best, we become stupid. Across the board cost cutting driven from the top down isn’t always the smartest approach.

When you’re up to your neck in alligators, you may forget that your goal was to drain the swamp.  However, that doesn’t make the snapping jaws any less real. Nor will a trip aboard the Starship Enterprise to the final frontier of culture change, despite the assertions of a recent article in The Wall Street Journal.

It’s hard to argue against the two studies quoted in the article, claiming the limitations of cost-cutting initiatives.  I’m even willing to believe in the benefits of culture change, though the survey touting them was conducted by a consulting firm that makes its money from, of all things, selling culture change.

But what bothers me is the article’s mystification of culture. The “right” culture comes across as the magic beans that will grow a giant stalk of profitability. The definition we’re offered by a business school professor is “people believe in the organization, in their land manager, and therefore help them perform as much as possible, they think they are valued by the organization, both employers and workers are gaining mutual benefit.”

Now all of this is good stuff, but it’s just the kind of thing that gives my profession a bad name (or makes people question if it is a profession.)  I can’t see any one of my clients betting their company’s survival on “you’ve got to believe,” nor would I have any idea how to quickly effect such a belief.

Culture is the set of ingrained habits that determine the way people do things in the absence of prescriptive policies and procedures. But more than just belief is needed to realign those habits with the critical success factors of the business. It takes a consistent message, conveyed through everything leaders do and say, about how people can come together, behave in specific ways to overcome obstacles, and achieve an exciting vision of the future.

But when the alligators are restless, there’s a more immediate way to achieve efficiencies and refocus efforts. Gather the responsible people together and give them all of the unvarnished information you can about the state of the business. Share the financials and the challenges. Then ask them to work together to come up with recommendations on what to do.

This will engage them, give them control over their destiny, and create ownership for what needs to be done.  Since they’re closer to the work, they’ll avoid many of the mistakes that are inevitable when cost-cutting is mandated from the top down.  If two heads are better than one, an entire organization of minds is bound to come up with better ideas than an individual manager, no matter how smart he or she may be.

This approach can be implemented quickly and doesn’t depend on turning around the Queen Mary of corporate culture before results are achieved.  Nor does it require a starship, or beans of any kind.  And when it’s employed, a high performing culture magically takes hold.

And looking back, I can see how impoverished my life was before I bought my iphone. Now in those awkward moments when I stand in a crush of people eager to get off a plane or sit in a restaurant waiting for my dining companion, I nonchalantly pull out my phone and check my messages. I’m good being alone, long as I’ve got my phone.

While once I couldn’t understand why in the world my eleven year old daughter would rather text me than call, I now appreciate the wordplay and creative spelling the medium encourages. Apparently the majority of us prefer communicating through the rather more constrained channels of email and texting than over the phone. Ostensibly it’s because of the time it saves, but it also requires less engagement.

Given the economic environment, most businesses have cut back on travel and now rely on new communication technologies for meetings and even educational events. VOIP and webinar applications make such meetings virtually free. It would seem a no-brainer that it’s the way to go.

But I’ve long suspected that something essential is lost when we opt for communication mediated by technology, and apparently the cost benefit calculation is not quite as straightforward as it seems. New data suggests that much more is lost than saved. Not only does the lack of face-to-face contact lead to a decrease in performance, it also makes us a bit slower on the uptake.

A recent article in The New York Times makes a compelling case for the importance of human touch. From education to medicine to athletics, touch leads to improved results. The author of the article, Benedict Carey, thinks it may have to do with human contact releasing the hormone oxytocin. Not only does this lead to a higher level of trust, it ameliorates the negative effect of the stress hormone cortisol on brain.

When it comes to business, the implications couldn’t be any clearer. The quality of decision-making and the degree of teamwork based on trust are, in my experience, the key determinants of performance. Cutting back on face-to-face meetings may be penny wise, but it’s pound foolish.

Technology does amplify human ability. We can move about the planet faster, calculate more rapidly, and even do considerably more damage to property and one another. But the technology is developing at such a rate that it’s outpacing our species’ ability to evolve with it. For at least a quarter of million years, live human contact has been essential to enhancing the cooperation that has made us successful, and it will continue to be for generations to come.

One effect of cortisol on the brain is to narrow our vision so that we focus on the immediate threat, but cortisol also causes us to lose sight of the longer term. In tough economic times, we do have to carefully manage expenses, but we have to be just as careful that in doing so, we don’t undermine the foundation of the company we’re trying to save. Business is a human activity and the relationships that make it work must be nourished.

So reach out and touch someone.

All of these are just examples of what economists tell us is structural, not cyclical change. The business world is now a fundamentally different place, and things are not about to return to the way they were. In my day job, I see lots of pain out there, which drives an intense focus on cost reduction and a strong aversion to risk trying anything new. While it’s understandable that in such times people would just hunker down, I fear this is exactly the opposite of what needs to be done.

When a crisis hits, our fight or flight reaction kicks in, narrowing our vision to what it takes to survive. But the unexpected and painful event can also stop the automatic processing of the brain and change the way we look at things. We become more willing to change, and with a fresh perspective, we become more innovative and recognize new opportunities. How we respond is a conscious decision.

At the same time our economy is being transformed, so too is our understanding of how our minds work and how we make such decisions. We’re learning about how our perceptions shape the world we live in, how much our actions are driven by emotion and not logic, and how big ideas change the way the mind works. These and other findings of brain science challenge the conventional wisdom on how to conduct business.

The changes roiling the economy and the latest brain research combine to create an imperative for every company to fundamentally rethink their business. Customer needs have changed, but now we have better ways of understanding what they are. Costs must be controlled, but there are new management practices and organizational designs that ensure greater efficiency. Fundamental change is now a fact of life, but we have the tools to help people prosper from it.

Perhaps the most fundamental lesson of brain science is that the world is only what we think it is, but our thoughts will determine our actions. My bet is that those that see the present as an opportunity are going to take the bold action needed to flourish. Those that don’t will be yesterday’s news.

My first thought was that this was a much more complex business than I had ever encountered. Just as I despaired of ever getting a handle on it, he made a statement that brought it all together.

But then his explanation moved back to a level of detail that had me lost again. After a couple of minutes, another statement clarified everything. Clearly, there was a pattern here.

The best way I can describe it is by distinguishing between inductive and deductive thinking. Inductive thinking is the basis of scientific method—it builds from empirical evidence to a general idea that encompasses the evidence. In contrast, deductive thinking starts with the general idea and then reasons back down to the experience.

It’s only to be expected that a highly trained engineer would favor inductive thinking and feel at home in a world of technical detail. But the business world prefers that information be presented deductively: tell me what you’re going to tell me and then fill in the details.

When my client was explaining his business, I got lost in the trees.  It was only periodically that I would catch a glimpse of the forest.

Smart, well-trained engineers are the lifeblood of high technology companies, but without a strong business focus, there will be no company. Often, there is a split down the middle of the company, with the engineers on one side and the business people on the other.

Neither are terribly enamored of one another. Not speaking the same language, each has a hard time understanding what the other is saying. The cooperation that is essential for the success of the company is elusive.

One way to bridge the gap is for each to recognize they need to turn their thinking upside down. Going against their nature, the engineers need to present their conclusions first, and only then back them up with the detailed logic they’re so good at.

Likewise, the business people need to turn their thinking upside down and present the logic that leads to their conclusions. It will enhance their credibility with their more technical colleagues.

When both try to think like the other, communication and cooperation will improve. It’s not a bad approach to take whenever we’re confronted with people different than ourselves.

I wasn’t in the Caribbean for a vacation. A Latin American client was looking for a place to hold an executive offsite, so I suggested the island I had lived on for four years. With tourism down, both travel and rooms were inexpensive, and the location of the island relative to the company’s offices made it very cost effective to hold our meeting there.

I had put together a very aggressive agenda for this meeting and we found ourselves working 12 to 14 hours a day. When I’m facilitating, I am totally immersed in my work and can barely even find time to respond to emails. let alone surf the news websites. So to be frank, I didn’t even realize the magnitude of what was going on in Haiti.

This island has a large Haitian population, so little by little the news leaked into our meeting room. It wasn’t cleaned our second day because the housekeepers were Haitian and too consumed with worry about their friends and family to show up for work. The third day a relief benefit was held in the building next to ours. By the fourth day, we had all had a minute or two to read about the catastrophe and were quickly becoming aware of the scope of the disaster.

I have many friends on the island from Haiti and had long heard the tales of the horrendous conditions in the country. Several month ago, I wrote a post about Charles, who had survived a harrowing boat trip as a teenager to escape the poverty. One morning two years ago, I had woken up and looked out my window, only to see the coast guard fishing a body out of the ocean. A sloop from Haiti full of people looking for a better life had capsized just a few hundred yards from shore. An estimated eighty bodies were never even found.

With our meeting over and an acknowledged success, I flew back to the U.S. Finally, I had a chance to catch up on the news I had missed. It was even far worse than I could have imagined. The numbers of the dead and displaced were incomprehensible. Gut-wrenching pictures of injured children were all over the major internet news sites. The day I returned, a 6.1 aftershock hit the island. There was not much additional physical damage, journalists reported, but the psychic trauma to an already shaken people was huge.

Such calamities stop us in our tracks. They halt the automatic processing of our brains and activate the areas responsible for seeing the whole. We’re pulled back to a vantage point that changes our perspective on everything. The dissonance primes us for a change in what we value and how we behave.

I have felt numb since my return and nothing seems quite the same. I look around my house and wonder why I ever thought I needed all of the stuff I’ve accumulated. I listen to my daughters bicker as close sibling will do, and question how I ever could’ve been irritated by it. I reflect on the worries that used to seem so all consuming and feel ashamed.

This morning I read about the debate over whether we should send more financial aid to Haiti–we currently give about 97 cents per American. Many feel the country is so far gone that it’s just a waste of money. Others write that such handouts diminish the spirit of industry needed to turn the country around.

I also read about Goldman Sachs’ near record profit, just a small fraction of which, if invested in Haiti, could transform the lives of its people.  I then thought about Lloyd Blankfein’s comment that the firm was doing God’s work.

Later when I was driving my daughters to school, I must have committed some heinous traffic sin, for another motorists made an obscene gesture. When I then pulled up at a light next to him, he refused to look in my direction. When eye contact is made, it’s hard not to empathize and see the other person as a human being like yourself.

Haiti’s earthquake is one of Obama’s “teachable moments.” It should change everything, from the tone of our political debate over issues like healthcare to the unproductive squabbling in our business organizations. We need to focus on what’s fundamentally important to us as human beings.

First, though,we need to stop and look each other in the eye.

In Prisoners’ Dilemma, the logical bet is for both prisoners to look out for themselves and not depend on the other one being trustworthy. It’s a particularly interesting game for business because it mirrors life in most organizations. Each member stands to benefit from collective action, if everyone else is trustworthy. But if they’re not, looking out for number one is often the safer strategy. Or as a client once put it, “If it’s a question of my team being successful or sending my son to college, it’s a no brainer.”

Because of this, leaders have long struggled with the issue of trust, but now through the miracle of modern science, we have a solution. Everyone just needs a little sniff of Oxytocin nasal spray, which is apparently available on the internet for as little as $29.95 for a two week supply. That’s quite a bit cheaper than hiring a team building consultant.

Tempting as it may be, this is precisely the kind of lesson we don’t want to learn from brain science. It’s not only that the same spray could be used for dishonest purposes–imagine if it were pumped into the showrooms of used car dealers, but that we’re drawing the wrong kind of lessons from the latest discoveries. The real learning is that our behavior is driven less by the nature of any situation we may find ourselves in, than by the way we think about the situation. Change the thinking and we change the behavior, and we can it do perfectly well without recourse to pharmaceuticals.

Recently, one of my clients was distressed by the unwillingness of his direct reports to be held accountable. As a result, he was focused on how to improve the organization’s measurement systems and how to establish clear consequences for non-performance. While the right kind of measures are critical for any business and while people should not be immune from the consequences of a failure to perform, accountability is less of a problem to be solved than it is a symptom of a more basic issue.

When I talked to the direct reports, they weren’t unwilling to be held accountable. They just didn’t agree with what they were being held accountable for. Their objectives were set top down, and they felt that they didn’t match the reality of their businesses. Much as they respected and even admired their boss, they were convinced he was too far removed from operations to understand what they were up against. The perceptions of each were different and in conflict.

Our logical minds are deluded into either/or thinking. In fact, one of Aristotle’s laws of logic mandates that there can be no middle ground–something is either the case or it is not.  Either the objectives are fair or they’re not. Either the boss is right or the employees are. But when we move beyond logic and incorporate how the mind works, we appreciate that both the manager and his direct reports are right, from their point of view.

The solution to this disconnect is not tighter measures and more draconian consequences. It’s impossible to build an infallible system for accountability and threats of punishment hardly motivate people to give their all for the business. Instead, the conflict should be taken as an opportunity to rethink the business from the top down.

Our ideas are instantiated  in neural networks arranged hierarchically in the brain. Those at higher levels drive decision-making and behavior at lower levels that are in harmony with them. If we get agreement at the highest levels, operational conflicts disappear.

When I pulled together my client and his team to address the conflict over accountability, we started by agreeing on a vision for the business and a strategy to achieve it.  With everyone in sync on what they wanted to accomplish and how best to do it, the objectives and how to ensure they were met just fell out naturally. Even better, the managers now worked toward achieving their objectives because they wanted to, not because they were afraid of the consequences if they didn’t. The result was a tighter and more efficient organization, and far more engagement from everyone. In just a quarter, performance improved significantly.

A squirt of nasal spray might have made the direct reports more trusting of their boss and the boss more trusting of his people. But it wouldn’t have made the direct reports able to achieve objectives that didn’t fit their businesses. The best chance of improving performance is to address how people think at the highest level.

Unfortunately, it’s a double-edged sword. It certainly saved me a lot of time and trouble writing my recent book, but I also find I know far more about Tiger Woods’s sexual peccadilloes than I care to. In the past, my knowledge would’ve been limited to what I could pick up from the tabloids while I stood in the checkout line at the supermarket. Now I’m just a click away from the article in the Hindustan Times on the “25,000 pounds on orgies with hookers” he spent, and it doesn’t even appear until tomorrow.

Despite the fact that I’m the one that decides to click on such articles, it’s easy to fault the internet for clogging my brain with garbage. But like every aspect of our experience, it’s not so much what something is, but what our minds do with it that determines its worth. The brain is a vast network of relationships, and when one piece of data is linked to another, the mind can generate valuable insights even from information that seems worthless at first glance.

The internet vastly extends the network of relationships, because it gives us access not just to bits of data, but to other minds making connections between the bits of data. In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Gail Collins frames the “hysteria over Tiger Woods” as a useful way for us to gain respite from the really depressing news on healthcare reform and the escalation of the war in Afghanistan.

Sam Tanenhaus links the story to the historian Daniel Boorstin’s distinction between celebrity and heroism. Celebrity is created by the media, while heroism is a result of the acts of the individual. Our focus on celebrity is an indication of the decline of society’s values. But by trying to remain aloof, Woods has paradoxically allowed the media to define him, both for good and for ill.

This same theme is picked up by Belinda Luscombe in an article in Time. She writes that Woods’s wife Elin should take a lesson from Jenny Sanford, the “new hero” of “cheated-upon spouses.” “Sanford deftly and subtly grasped her part of the narrative and spun it. Hers is not the story of a dull wife who was passed over for an exotic soul mate in Argentina, but rather the tale of the true captain of a family ship, unbowed by the squalls.”

By refusing to stand by her husband at his news conference and through her own interview with AP and a profile in Vogue, she defined herself, preempting the media’s spin. We now see her through her own, self-created narrative.

My link is to organizational leadership.  Most cognitive scientists now believe that our minds work through stories, and we are defined both for ourselves and for others through the story we tell. As Tiger Woods has learned from his silence, in the absence of a carefully crafted story, others will impose their own story on events. The story we tell is not just a pejorative “spin,” but an heroic act.

All organizations have a collective story their members tell. In times like these, marked by devastating layoffs and examples of corporate greed, the story being told is not good either for the business or for the individual. It saps any sense of loyalty and desire to work for the common good, and it leads to lives of not so quiet desperation.

Leaders need to create a counter-narrative with an aspirational vision of the future that gets people committed and excited. The story is told with words, but it’s also told with decisions and actions. There’s no magic to creating stories, for they are just what the individual leaders need to tell themselves to ensure their own commitment.  By thinking about what we need, we’ll know what others need as well.

Maybe following the Tiger Woods saga isn’t such a waste of time after all, but one of those teachable moments we keep hearing about today. Then again, maybe every moment is teachable, if we make the right connections. To be valuable, internet links need more than just a mouse click. They need an open mind.

However, there are times when there’s a greater cause for concern, and this may be one of those times. The struggling economy is taking its toll, not just on those families that are suffering from lost jobs, but on all of us that are forced to lower our expectations. Many of us are having to set aside our dreams for retirement or for a life with reasonable financial security. There just doesn’t seem to be anything on the horizon that will soon restore our lost prosperity.

The policy makers that are elected to help us in times like these aren’t proving to be much help. Whether it’s the initial stimulus package, the need for another, or the reform of a health care system that represents a sixth of our economy, there seems to be an unconscionable level of finger pointing and game playing.  One begins to sense that all too many are more concerned with whether they personally win or lose than whether they resolve the problems our country is facing.

The same  spirit seems to rule the media. So much of what I read and hear is about why the other side is not only wrong, but lacking the basic human values each side claims for itself. Conspicuously absent is an appreciation for someone else’s point of view and any attempt to use the competition of ideas to arrive at better ones than any of us can come up with on our own.

And having just endured the Monday morning commute, I see the same selfishness in our society at large. Too many drivers are unwilling to let others merge in front of them, as if the race to work is a life and death matter to be determined by the precious seconds one might lose.

There’s pretty good data that our species is driven by what Richard Dawkins has called the “selfish gene,” but there’s also abundant evidence that humans flourish because of their ability to cooperate.  Those individual sacrifices we are called upon to make in the short term pay huge dividends in the longer term.  The world we live in is made better by our collective effort.

So perhaps we need to stop looking to our elected officials for leadership and one by one, demonstrate it ourselves. Those mirror neurons recently discovered in our brains encourage us to mimic the thoughts and actions of others, and for others to mimic our thoughts and actions. In this way, adaptive behaviors become contagious.  In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell describes how a fondness for Hush Puppies spread through our culture.  Imagine what would happen if self-sacrifice and civility were to spread the same way.

It all starts with what some have call “random acts of kindness.” We let that stranger merge in front of us during the morning commute, and they then mimic the behavior and let another stranger merge in front of them.  Little by little, the behavior spreads until road rage is replaced with all of us politely nodding and smiling at one another. The pleasant mood we would all find ourselves in at the end of the commute might just carry over into our work and then into the rest of our lives.

With the norm becoming civility and cooperation, divisive politicians and journalists would find themselves shunned. It would soon become clear that the only way to get elected or sell products for your advertisers would be to focus on the common good.  Those that didn’t would be ostracized.  Soon perhaps even the bankers would feel compelled to set aside self-interest, and obscene compensation packages would become a thing of the past.

I know that this is a bit of a pipe dream, but at a local level, polite behavior does create wonders. Try going out of your way to be friendly and treat others with respect.  All of a sudden, people become friendly in return, and life seems less stressful and more fun. One begins to feel better about the human race and not as pessimistic about our prospects for the future.

We may not transform the world at large, but we will transform the world we live in, and that’s a pretty good start.

In a recent column in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman gives us a perfect example of what happens when the narrative is missing. Reviewing all of President Obama’s policy initiatives, Friedman writes that they’re beginning “to feel like a work plan that we have to slog through,” because we’re missing the story that ties them all together and inspires.