Understanding and Changing Your Management Style: Assessments and Tools for Self-Development, 2nd Edition

Introduction

What Leaders and Managers Need to Know About Human Nature

Why start a book on management and leadership with a chapter on human nature? Clearly this belongs in the sociobiological or the philosophical area. However, recent findings in neuroscience and in the cognitive sciences point to new directions for understanding our nature; they have an impact on how we become who we are and how we react to our environment in order to survive and compete.

Old theories of nature versus nurture have become outdated and have been replaced by more interactive ways of thinking that no longer rely on an either-or approach to our understanding of which came first or which is dominant in our development. In The Blank Slate, Pinker (2002) has dispelled ...