Writers Tackle ‘Dinosaur Brains’ in Business

Today’s workplace can be a real jungle, says Albert Bernstein, and what can make it even worse are people using their “dinosaur brains.”

Who has a dinosaur brain? Anybody who ever acted on instinct and thought it was logic, Bernstein said. Anybody who’s ever been irrational, emotional, temperamental, stubborn or cantankerous.

Granted, such emotions are a fact of life. But when they interfere with how business is conducted, their effect can be deadly.

Figuring out how to act rationally when those around us are acting like prehistoric beasts is the point of Bernstein and Sydney Craft Rozen’s book, “Dinosaur Brains: Dealing With All Those Impossible People at Work” (John Wiley, 248 pp., $18.95).

The book is a how-to--such as how to deal with a supervisor whose idea of constructive criticism is screaming, “You’re an idiot!”--and a critical look at the way American business is done.

“I was trained as a psychotherapist, and I started doing some business consulting,” Bernstein said. “What I was seeing wasn’t rational. I saw a lot of the same kinds of instinctual rituals going on in business, no matter what the business was.”

Those instinctual rituals are illustrated in the book through lively anecdotes and situations, depicting what Bernstein calls “lizard logic,” followed by advice and recommendations on how to keep your own dinosaur brain from taking over.

Bernstein said he had used dinosaurs to describe human situations in his seminars and consulting work. “I used to call it the ‘lizard brain,’ ” he said. “I found that people were able to grasp the concepts” but still have some fun in the process.

Be it the chairman of the board or the chief of the mail room, many believe that the business world is indeed a jungle and that reptilian behavior is acceptable, Bernstein said.

“Business schools are great for developing dinosaur brains,” he said. “They are to blame in terms of what they focus on. Most of the business schools I know about teach you very little about interpersonal relations.

“They say ‘That’s not important, what’s important is the bottom line and the way you do your job.’ But the way you do that job is by motivating people and getting along with them.

“A lot of managers don’t know exactly what it is they’re supposed to be doing because they learned a lot of myths in management school.

“Schools set up competitive situations that focus mostly on financial things and not on anything that can’t be measured--what’s the morale here, how creative are the ideas, what will this department be doing in another 10 years.”

By not paying attention to such intangibles, Bernstein said, companies end up losing in the long run.

“If you try to keep things quiet and keep people down under your thumb, what you usually end up doing is getting rid of your most creative people,” he said. “Managers are not yet realizing that workers are no longer disposable.”

Another disturbing trend, Bernstein said, is that “management has become less a thing to do and more a social class.”

“Management seems to be done for its own sake rather than the product. It’s like managers get together and talk management with one another. It doesn’t involve the people below them at all. A manager has become who you are rather than what you do.

“I’ve heard so many say to me that management is management, that you can manage at an auto plant or an airline, the job is the same and they really don’t have to know about the business.

“Well, you can’t no more teach what you ain’t learned than you can go back to where you ain’t been.

“If you’re a manager and you’re trying to make a decision about what goes on on the shop floor, it’s in your best interest to ask the person who’s been doing the job for 20 years. If you don’t, you’re really operating in the dark. But an awful lot of that goes on.”

That kind of thinking must change, Bernstein said, if American business expects to make any economic gains internationally.

“The biggest force for change is that we’re losing to the competition,” he said. “We never had any competition so we could do things the way we wanted to.

“Now the Japanese are showing us the way to really get ahead is to do long-term planning. But long-term planning is hard work and dinosaur brains like to shoot from the hip.”

Bernstein advocates the Japanese concept of participative management, something American business has been reluctant to accept.

“In order to make participative management work, you have to be willing to let people make mistakes,” he said. “As soon as you give someone new powers, they have to know what the limits are, so they have to test those limits.

“You can’t say to someone, ‘Go do it, but check with me before you make any decision.’

“One of the big things American business hates is mistakes. They have this idea that only bad people make mistakes. If something goes wrong, you find out who’s to blame, you punish them and that somehow sets it right.”

The point of any well-run business, Bernstein said, is to “make a smooth operation that can regulate itself,” and to that end, workers and managers have to work together.

“In the dinosaur world the way to get ahead is to display, show how good you are, operate vestigially, represent a threat,” Bernstein said. “In the end that’s not very productive.

“People will look at this book and say, ‘It’s basically common sense, isn’t it?’ Well, it is. But getting people to use common sense in situations where it’s warranted is the hard trick.”