M is for Manager & Mind

I was lucky enough to give a presentaiton at the CHrsitmas Function of the Australian Institute of Management's "Public Speaking Club" last week. This is how it went:

"Since I last spoke to you I had yet another birthday, they are becoming an annual thing. A friend of mine told me that being married makes for a longer life. Married men may live longer – but they wish they didn’t.

The good news is that tonight I can show you the way to a increase your life span and techniques which you can use in your own life. I invite you to compare it with your own experiences and decide what you think.

M may be for Manager but I am sure that you know that the key to a good manager is the power of their mind.

Who has been on a management development seminar/boot camp/retreat where you are encouraged to get in touch with your right brain? Now tell me, how many people weren’t already being creative in their jobs?

Recent research at Harvard Business School has identified that companies can get just as much management development by also developing the logical left side. Let’s for a few moments talk about our brain – we’ve all got one. We do gym classes for our body but when was the last time you exercised your brain to develop it.

The early brain explorers like Freud were convinced that the brain developed up until late teens and then couldn’t be developed further. Yet we also know that Socrates and Galileo were at their most productive in their 60s & 70s.

Enter the field of neurogenesis. We now know that we can make our brain continue growing, offsetting aging , dementia and Alzheimers as well as helping us be productively engaged with society for much longer.

So how can we exercise the brain?

• Manage By Walking About
• Read funny books - humour
• Play games –chess suduko
• Act out – role play scenarios
• Find what you’re not learning
• Get the most out of business trips – visit a museum , Milan story
• Take notes and then re-read them –Branson, NLP
• Try new technologies – geeks ville
• Learn a new language – Italian
• Exercise, exercise, exercise
  

I said earlier that M is for Manager for I think we are a long way towards knowing that the mind makes the manager. Albert Einstein said that Imagination is more important that knowledge. I hope that each one of this in this room continues over this next year to develop our minds. So much so that I’ve already enrolled in Italian lessons starting next year. Perhaps next year, instead of opening with Guten Abent, perhaps we’ll be saying Buona sera."