more intuitive, conceptual, synthesizing, and artistic. And so,
of course, do we. As I talked with the people I interviewed for
this book, I was struck again and again by the fact that, what-
ever their occupations, they relied as much on their intuitive
and conceptual skills as on their logical and analytical talents.
These are whole-brained people, capable of using both sides of
their brain.
In any corporation, managers serve as the left brain and the
research and development staff serves as the right brain, but the
CEO must combine both, must have both administrative and
imaginative gifts. One of the reasons that so few corporate exec-
utives have successfully made the leap from capable manager to
successful leader is that the corporate culture, along with society
as a whole, recognizes and rewards left-brain accomplishments
and tends to discount right-brain achievements. Bottom-line
thinking is a manifestation of left-brain dominance. Habits are
born in the left brain and unmade in the right.
When Anne Bryant was executive director of the AAUW,
she used something she calls “the hot air balloon exercise” to
encourage her staff to think imaginatively. “You take people up
in an imaginary balloon and from up there you can see the en-
tire entity. Then you examine what you see, who you see, what
they’re doing, and what other things they might be doing. You
imagine, for instance, what might happen if you put $500,000
toward child development research or what might be done
about teen pregnancy.”
Acknowledging the constant dilemma of organizations, and
the pull between left-brain habits and right-brain visions,
Richard Schubert, then CEO of the American Red Cross, told
me, “I’m constantly torn between the obvious need to support
the existing structure and the equally obvious need to change it.”
Operating on Instinct