In September 2015, journalist Caitlin Moran published a provocative article in The Saturday Times Magazine about ‘What men need to know about women’. She maintained that there were two fundamental things that defined women in the 21^st century that men really needed to understand. And if they did understand these two things, they would change the way they behaved – overnight.

It was not about the tiny things – why it takes so long for us to get dressed, or why we can so easily lose our confidence – it’s much more fundamental than that.

The first thing is that we’re scared – and we’re fundamentally scared of men. Not all men; if we’re lucky, we have fathers, brothers, lovers, friends, who treat us well and make us feel safe. But we live in fear of what men can do to us. They are bigger, stronger, and faster than we are. If we are unlucky, they can hurt us, sexually attack us, and even kill us. And there’s not very much we can do about it.

Men need to understand how much courage it takes for a woman to walk down a dark street alone at night, to go on a blind date, or to marry a stranger.

The second thing is that we’re tired – tired of fighting our corner, and making such achingly slow progress. Business cultures, religious and country laws are still often biased towards men. Our pay for the same work done is still a long way behind men’s. We learn to accept the judgements and comments about our bodies, our thoughts, and our feelings. Cultural and religious leaders define what we can wear, if we can go to school or not, and who we can marry. We are often expected to make the coffee at work, however high our pay grade is. And there’s not very much we can do about it.

Men need to understand how much exhausting effort it takes for a woman to be herself, to assert her thoughts and make her own genuine contribution.

At the most basic level, women understand what fear is, how it can drive behaviour and can corrode a life.

Becoming a fear-free woman is all about using our brain, not our brawn. We will never be bigger, stronger or faster than the men who make us feel unsafe, but we can learn to use our brains to understand the context we live in and to adapt in the best way we can. We can even learn how to change it.

The first step is ensuring access to education for all girls, everywhere. Part of that education must include learning how the brain works: not just the human brain with its emphasis on emotions, memories and relationships, but also how men and women’s brains differ.

Armed with an understanding of how men expect to behave in business meetings will help make the lone woman perform better. Being aware that violent responses in a partner are more to do with his psychology than anything to do with the abused woman will help her to make the decision to leave him sooner. Knowing how to engage the ‘attachment’ emotions of love/trust and excitement/joy in others, instead of the ‘survival’ emotions of fear, anger, sadness, shame or disgust will create the environment where men and women can both thrive and be fear-free.

Signs that someone you work with is struggling

1. Something is different: If you notice changes in a person’s mood or demeanor that is a sure sign that person is struggling. He or she might become irritable, easy to anger, and quick to rise to perceived bait. There will be a failure of humor. You will notice changes in body language – a slumped posture rather than sitting tall, a look of grim determination, a lack of spring in their step, a dull look in the eyes, facial expressions that communicate sadness. The person will be at odds with their colleagues. He or she will be defensive and throw up blocks to suggestions and offers of help. The person will avoid talking to colleagues and managers.
2.  It’s all too much: People who are struggling at work will be feeling quite overwhelmed. They will have trouble concentrating, will be easily distracted and will struggle to complete tasks. The quality of work produced will deteriorate. He or she will be unable to pull back to see the big picture. People will try and multi-task. As the brain is not able to multi-task people will get tangled in knots and in a complete muddle. People do not like to be seen as struggling and will try and hide their difficulties. Rather than ask for help they will dig their heels in and pursue strategies that are not working.
3.  Compliant People Pleasers: When the going gets tough managers who can’t cope might panic and resort to cracking the whip to get people going. Alas, when employees are afraid of their manager they will expend most of their energy on survival tactics; watching their back, pleasing their boss, becoming a ‘yes man’, currying favor, being compliant. Fear spreads like a virus and stops people in their tracks. Leaders should be wary of teams that appear too compliant, are not engaged in debate, are not producing good work and appear afraid of their boss.

BRAIN GAIN: During almost three years of its existence, Brain Gain has been variously propounding the view that twentieth century psychology failed completely to establish a real science of human behavior. Having developed as a descriptive rather than an explanatory science psychology had, by the end of the twentieth century, and from a practical use and added value point of view, effectively stalled.
The emerging modern neurosciences in the early twenty-first century offered a different way of thinking about human behaviour in general and organizational behaviour in particular.
It began to be apparent from an increasing understanding of how the brain works that both psychology and management theory in general had missed the (now) remarkably obvious point that humans beings are energy systems.  In consequence any organization’s profit statements are measures not only of accounting skill but are also describing the accumulated output of the ways that human energy has been applied within any corporate system.

That being so, some reflections about what is happening to human energy in the US Presidential elections might give a predictive angle of observation.
Superficially, of course, there is an extraordinary waste of energy in the internecine battling that the primaries elicit – paralleled only by the extraordinary amounts of money that fuel the campaigns.  But that puts the focus only on the candidates and their political machines.  What is happening within the electorate?
Neuroscientist Paul Zak, author of The Moral Molecule, is the lead proponent of the view that oxytocin, the attachment neurochemical, is a key to understanding human behaviour.  Writing in Business Insider Tanya Lewis describes Zak’s approach: “In a recent experiment, Zak and his colleagues wired up a group of registered Republicans with sensors that detect their brain waves while they watched the January 14 and January 28 GOP (Republican) presidential debates.”

“During the earlier debate, real-estate mogul Donald Trump scored the highest among the study participants on measures of attention, but low on emotional resonance. None of the candidates scored very high on emotional resonance, either — which might have been because they were all competing for attention.

In the January 28 debate (in which Trump declined to participate), Zak and his colleagues found that Rubio ‘won’ because he earned the highest combination of both attention and emotional resonance. As a result, Zak predicted that Rubio would do well in the (immediately following) Iowa caucuses — which he did, surprising with a strong third-place finish.”

Well, perhaps it comes down to what one might mean by ‘a winning formula’.  Perhaps, more importantly, if a surge of oxytocin is (like any other neurochemical) both the result of perception and then cause of behaviour, what if a candidate seeking to become the leader of the world’s most powerful nation somehow tapped into energies within the population that were lying around dormant and unused or unfocused.

Or what if energies were to be released that relied on a much more complex mix of the neurochemicals that control behaviour than oxytocin alone?   What if stress chemical cortisol were remarkably persistent in large swathes of the population, some more than others, and Trump’s style and manner happened to release and reduce it in those who had it – though increased it in those (Democrats) who didn’t?  If the latter, then Democrats get more vocal and start polarizing the debate, creating the significance for Donald trump that satisfies the cortisol reduction (and perhaps oxytocin generation) of the proposed large swathes?

It is the contention of Brain Gain that Donald Trump is doing something just like that.

Trump is releasing energies that no other contending politician, least of all Hillary Clinton, has the natural skill to release. Immensely skillful as she is, her connecting powers are limited.  It is the quality that lost her the Presidential fight against Barack Obama. It will also lose her the fight against Donald Trump whilst he is creating a wave of support that is propelling him not only to becoming the Republican candidate in November’s Presidential election but into the White House.

And if that analysis is anything like correct, the gap between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton at the final count will be surprisingly large.

Trump himself is, of course, not a simple man.  And he may yet run himself into electoral bankruptcy as he has run himself into commercially very tight corners indeed.  But he also has bounce-back capacity of an extraordinary. It’s the leader who can mobilise the complexity of the brains of others who then harnesses them to whatever advantages are being sought.

So Brain Gain predicts that the next leader of the world’s most powerful nation will be Donald Trump.  And this column has been sent to the Editor at 10pm Singapore time on Tuesday 1^st March 2016 – long before any results of any kind are in.

In 1979, campaigning for her first election victory, and contemplating the wreckage of an economy that she was about to struggle to transform, Margaret Thatcher said:  “All we have in this country is the energies of its people.”  Donald Trump somehow knows that too.

In our book ‘The Fear Free Organization’ we tackle fear at work, using neuroscience to explain why fear is so destructive, and what can be done to get rid of it. Fear at work damages people and businesses, and directly impacts the bottom-line. Fear-free organisations and the people in them flourish and succeed.

But fear is part of so many aspects of our lives today: bullies thrive on triggering fear in others, and fearful citizens prefer not to get too involved in a society that scares them.

We find fear in schools, which stunts children’s potential. Fear in families sets up damaging behaviour for life, and fear in marriages makes people stay together despite hate and suffering. Fear in politics stops leaders doing the right thing, and can even trigger wars and destruction. Fear in religious institutions stops universal loving kindness.

Fear is a fundamental emotion that changes our behaviour to keep us safe. But when it is initiated by others, it is corrosive and harmful. We need to talk about how prevalent fear is in our world, and what needs to be done about it.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
—Upton Sinclair (1935)

On October 21^st 2015 The New York Times reported the recall of the potentially defective Tamarac airbag.   This report described the recall of over 19 million cars made by 12 automakers in the United States alone to fix the potentially dangerous airbags; millions more have been recalled in other countries. It was initially stated by Toyota that there had been no related injuries involving its vehicles but The New York Times reported in September that at least 139 injuries had occurred across all automakers.   In June Honda confirmed the eighth death linked to the faulty airbags. The New York Times further reported that these faults were known about since as long ago as 2004.

Organizations running on fear are likely to engage in defensive behaviors that can result in cover-ups. Cover-ups happen when employees are more afraid of losing their jobs than of telling the truth. In a fearful culture there is no benefit in holding leadership to account; whistle-blowers are criticized, ostracized, punished, and fired. Agendas, strategies, projects and products that should be sent back to the drawing board are pushed forward. The results can be devastating for organizations and for customers.

The worst thing that can happen to an organization running on fear is that people die. Examples include:

• January 1986 – 7 crew members died when the Challenger Space shuttle crashed. NASA and the manufacturer Morton Thokol disregarded warnings about a catastrophic flaw in the O-rings.
• 2003/2004 – The FDA issued warnings about an increase in suicidal thoughts among children and adolescents prescribed SSRI antidepressants including Paxil and Zoloft.
• September 2012 – GlaxoSmithKline, the UK’s largest drug maker, set aside $3bn to settle charges relating to its hiding scientific evidence showing the drug Paxil (branded Seroxat in the UK) was dangerous when prescribed for children and adolescents. As many as 12 suicides were linked to SSRI’s.
• February 2014 – In the UK it was announced that the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust was to be broken up. This was because of revelations that an estimated 500-1200 patients had died as a result of poor care between January 2005 and March 2009. Although unusually high death rates were noted as early as 2006, it took a whistle-blower to expose the problems and hold those responsible to account.
• 2014 – In the US the Phoenix VA hospital covered up the number of deaths to make statistics look better. Whistleblower Pauline DeWenter, a scheduling clerk working for the VA, was ordered to alter the records of waiting lists, and actual dates of deaths.
• August 2015 – 124 deaths and 275 injuries were linked to General Motor’s faulty ignition switch. GM initially said it was aware of 13 deaths. GM has set aside $625 million to pay victims.

In business cultures steeped in fear decisions may be driven solely by bottom-line delivery goals (‘do whatever is necessary to generate income’) rather than by aligning organizational values with individual values (‘do the right thing’). In a data-driven culture, the value of a human life plays second fiddle to cost-benefit analysis. For organizations basing decisions on cost-benefit ratios the cost of human lives may be small change when compared to driving forward faulty products or strategies that result in profits.

In April 2014 Jon Stewart criticized GM’s refusal to undertake costly repairs to their faulty ignition switch:

“They found out in 2001, they studied the problem for 4 years, did an internal cost-benefit analysis using your standard analytic, algorithm, barometric, PE ratio equations, and came up with ‘F**k it.'”