Washington DC
Business Week's recent review (March 19) of top undergraduate business programs lauded Cornell, but added that students must, "strangely enough, take a full year of biology." (p.66) Sorry editors, but there is nothing strange about it. Biology is to an understanding of leadership in the 21st Century as psychology was in the 20th Century. As leaders and followers, we are all products of our biochemistry and physiology - and in ways that are only now starting to emerge.
The Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela were among the first to introduce biology to the social sciences, especially in the biologic causality of emotion, cognition and behavior. Varela argued that human cognition and consciousness can only be understood in terms of the enactive structures in which they arise, chiefly the body and the physical world surrounding it. In 1991, Varela co-authored The Embodied Mind with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch and greatly advanced this mind-body thesis. Jon Kabat-Zinn's extraordinary work at the UMass Medical School to bring mindfulness into the mainstream of medicine and management through stress and anxiety reduction represents just the start of what will someday be a commonplace understanding of the links between, say, neural anatomy and impulsive, indifferent or reckless leadership.
The field of "change blindness" is one case in point. The Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois does terrific work showing how and why people can't or won't see the obvious or see very different things in a common object or circumstance. (http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demos.html)
The people at Koanetic Consulting use a simple "scotoma" or "blind spot" test to make a related point. They show how the brain fills in what it "thinks" it sees where, indeed, that particular object or color simply does not exist in the specified location. Is it any wonder that multiple witnesses of the same crime often report seeing very different things? (http://www.blindspottest.com/ww)
So, Business Week, it's all about biology and Cornell's undergraduates will be much better equipped as leaders and followers because of such a "strange" curriculum. (For more, see January 9th entry from Santiago, Chile.)
Business Week's recent review (March 19) of top undergraduate business programs lauded Cornell, but added that students must, "strangely enough, take a full year of biology." (p.66) Sorry editors, but there is nothing strange about it. Biology is to an understanding of leadership in the 21st Century as psychology was in the 20th Century. As leaders and followers, we are all products of our biochemistry and physiology - and in ways that are only now starting to emerge.
The Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela were among the first to introduce biology to the social sciences, especially in the biologic causality of emotion, cognition and behavior. Varela argued that human cognition and consciousness can only be understood in terms of the enactive structures in which they arise, chiefly the body and the physical world surrounding it. In 1991, Varela co-authored The Embodied Mind with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch and greatly advanced this mind-body thesis. Jon Kabat-Zinn's extraordinary work at the UMass Medical School to bring mindfulness into the mainstream of medicine and management through stress and anxiety reduction represents just the start of what will someday be a commonplace understanding of the links between, say, neural anatomy and impulsive, indifferent or reckless leadership.
The field of "change blindness" is one case in point. The Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois does terrific work showing how and why people can't or won't see the obvious or see very different things in a common object or circumstance. (http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demos.html)
The people at Koanetic Consulting use a simple "scotoma" or "blind spot" test to make a related point. They show how the brain fills in what it "thinks" it sees where, indeed, that particular object or color simply does not exist in the specified location. Is it any wonder that multiple witnesses of the same crime often report seeing very different things? (http://www.blindspottest.com/ww)
So, Business Week, it's all about biology and Cornell's undergraduates will be much better equipped as leaders and followers because of such a "strange" curriculum. (For more, see January 9th entry from Santiago, Chile.)