Contemporary Authors

• The Leading Brain: Powerful Science-Based Strategies for Achieving Peak Performance TarcherPerigee (New York, NY), 2017

1.  The leading brain : powerful science-based strategies for achieving peak performance LCCN 2016038838 Type of material Book Personal name Fabritius, Friederike, author. Main title The leading brain : powerful science-based strategies for achieving peak performance / Friederike Fabritius, MS, and Hans W. Hagemann, PhD. Published/Produced New York : TarcherPerigee, Book, [2017] Description xii, 324 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9780143129356 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER BF637.L4 F33 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• The Leading Brain Website - http://theleadingbrain.com/

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• Friederike Fabritius Website - https://www.fabulous-brain.com/

  About Friederike Fabritius

  Friederike Fabritius is a leading expert in the field of Neuroleadership. As an executive coach and leadership specialist, she has extensive expertise working with top executives from Fortune 500 companies. Clients worldwide have raved about her brain-based seminars and coaching sessions. A sought-after keynote speaker, she has addressed enthusiastic audiences at events hosted by large multinational corporations, such as Bayer, Audi, Siemens, trivago, EY (Ernst & Young), Montblanc, LafargeHolcim, and thyssenkrupp.
  Friederike is co-author of the widely acclaimed book, The Leading Brain: Powerful Science-Based Strategies for Achieving Peak Performance, published by Penguin/Random House in 2017.
  A neuropsychologist by education, Friederike focuses on using solid scientific findings to develop new methods and practices for leadership development. She is also an expert in designing learning systems that draw on the brain's inherent capabilities to acquire and retain new information effectively. Friederike herself has used these methods to learn six languages that she now speaks fluently.
  After starting at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research and then continuing as a management consultant at McKinsey, Friederike now applies her unique expertise in leadership consulting, where she has empowered countless clients to reach their full potential and deliver peak performance at critical moments.
  In addition to being a much-in-demand coach, consultant, and keynote speaker, Friederike serves on the advisory board of NeuroColor, a company that uses neuroscience in personality assessments. She is also a certified Co-Active Coach®.
  Capitalizing on the success of The Leading Brain in the workplace, Friederike is currently at work on a new book that applies the latest in brain science to address some of the biggest challenges in our personal lives.

• Amazon -

  FRIEDERIKE FABRITIUS, MS, is a pioneer in the field of Neuroleadership. A neuropsychologist by training and a leadership expert by profession, Friederike worked at the prestigious Max Planck Institute before honing her business expertise at renowned international management consultancy, McKinsey and Co. She has extensive experience working with top executives at Fortune 500 companies, leveraging her scientific background to create actionable insights.

  Learn more about Friederike www.fabulous-brain.com

Fabritius, Friederike & Hans W. Hagemann. The Leading Brain: Powerful Science-Based Strategies for Achieving Peak Performance

Dale Farris
142.2 (Feb. 1, 2017): p92.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Fabritius, Friederike & Hans W. Hagemann. The Leading Brain: Powerful Science-Based Strategies for Achieving Peak Performance. TarcherPerigee. Feb. 2017.352p. illus. notes, index. ISBN 9780143129356. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781101993200. PSYCH
Fabritius and Hagemann, both of the Munich Leadership Group, present an intriguing analysis of new research in brain science that is being used to better understand leadership, sharpen performance, encourage innovation, and enhance job satisfaction. Instead of yet another approach to leadership based on fads, these authors base their efforts on solid brain neuroscience and how distinct cognitive processes impact the way we act, react, and interact. Using cutting-edge research with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the authors actually witness the internal behavior and functions of the brain in action. The authors manage to translate the complex, highly technical brain analysis results into writing that will appeal to lay readers. The chapters cover how to achieve and sustain optimal performance, the ingredients for the neurococktail that can produce peak performance, maintaining and sustaining attention, opening the mind to ongoing learning, how to manage habits, how to tap into your unconscious, and the concept of neuroplasticity. VERDICT This new approach to understanding leadership transcends the more traditional application of psychology and will be valuable to individuals and teams ready to achieve their maximum potential and deliver extraordinary results.--Dale Farris, Groves, TX
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
Farris, Dale. "Fabritius, Friederike & Hans W. Hagemann. The Leading Brain: Powerful Science-Based Strategies for Achieving Peak Performance." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 92. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479301295&it=r&asid=d6db61ccf6bac2d4b59b513069449127. Accessed 10 Aug. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A479301295

The Leading Brain: Powerful Science-Based Strategies for Achieving Peak Performance

263.50 (Dec. 5, 2016): p63.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Leading Brain: Powerful Science-Based Strategies for Achieving Peak Performance
Friederike Fabritius and Hans W. Hagemann. TarcherPerigee, $26 (336p) ISBN 978-0-14-312935-6
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In their first book, neuropsychologist Fabritius and leadership expert Hagemann take a cogent, intriguing angle on leadership development. Leadership has long been treated as an art, they write, when it should be treated as a science based on a nuanced understanding of current theories about the brain. The authors, who run business seminars and coaching sessions based on their research and work, argue that understanding the neuroscience behind leadership is the best way to help business leaders and employees achieve their full potential. Fabritius and Hagemann cover the neurochemistry behind motivation, optimal stress levels, regulation of emotions, muscle relaxation, cultivation of gratitude, sharpening focus, the dangers of multitasking, and more. Where they truly excel is in their ability to translate complex neurochemistry into concrete actions that readers can take to make longterm adjustments, manage their habits, and foster a focused learning environment. Concrete, energetic, and accessible, this is a must-read for anyone who takes a science-backed approach to business. Agent: Jeff Herman, Jeff Herman Agency. (Feb.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Leading Brain: Powerful Science-Based Strategies for Achieving Peak Performance." Publishers Weekly, 5 Dec. 2016, p. 63. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475224902&it=r&asid=9e483bf3fd100517943838b7d1b8e61b. Accessed 10 Aug. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A475224902

Farris, Dale. "Fabritius, Friederike & Hans W. Hagemann. The Leading Brain: Powerful Science-Based Strategies for Achieving Peak Performance." Library Journal, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 92. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA479301295&asid=d6db61ccf6bac2d4b59b513069449127. Accessed 10 Aug. 2017. "The Leading Brain: Powerful Science-Based Strategies for Achieving Peak Performance." Publishers Weekly, 5 Dec. 2016, p. 63. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA475224902&asid=9e483bf3fd100517943838b7d1b8e61b. Accessed 10 Aug. 2017.

• Greater Good
  https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_hack_your_brain_for_peak_performance
  Word count: 1513

  How to Hack Your Brain for Peak Performance
  A new book shows how we can apply advances from neuroscience to work smarter and happier.
  By Summer Allen | February 17, 2017
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  Bookmark

  Everyone has days when they aren’t performing at the top of their game. I’m no exception. Some days, words flow readily to the page, and I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. Other days, I stare at the blank page or struggle to come up with insightful ideas.
  It would be nice if my efforts were more steady and productive. Fortunately, a new book offers science-based strategies for improving work performance, as well as becoming a better leader in the workplace. 
  In The Leading Brain: Powerful Science-Based Strategies for Achieving Peak Performance, authors Friederike Fabritius and Hans W. Hagemann of the Munich Leadership Group meld their business-world experience with findings from neuroscience to present a blueprint for how people can “work smarter, better, happier.”
  The book focuses mostly on how to achieve particular goals—such as sharpening your focus, developing helpful work habits, and creating a high-performing team—that can help with productivity. Although The Leading Brain is directed towards those in the business world, and to managers in particular, even I—who have never worked in a traditional business environment—discovered some surprising findings and useful tips.
  Hacking your stress

  The Leading Brain begins with the somewhat controversial concept of “optimal arousal.” With low arousal (or stress), people don’t have enough interest or attention to perform well; with too much arousal, they feel too anxious to focus. In other words, it’s not simply the case that less stress is better; some middle ground might be optimal.
  According to the book, the different levels of arousal people require for their own peak performance show up in their workplace personalities. People on one end of the spectrum may shut down under stressful situations, such as being asked to give an impromptu presentation. People on the other end might wait until the last minute to finish a project because they crave more pressure. In a worst-case scenario, Fabritius and Hagemann say that people who enjoy being stressed “sometimes manufacture emergencies” to survive in a traditional office environment, which they find stifling.
  To understand your own preferences, the authors suggest making a list of the activities you do in a typical workweek and ranking them according to how they make you feel (overaroused, underaroused, or at the top of your game). Then, you can use tricks to manipulate your work environment—altering your hours, changing the physical space in which you work, inserting humor or exercise into your day, or reallocating your responsibilities—to reach your own unique sweet spot.
  Maintaining focus
  Even with adequate arousal, people often find it difficult to maintain focus on work tasks. The Leading Brain offers many strategies for staying focused, such as:
  Don’t multitask! Fabritius and Hagemann really hammer this point home, describing what happens within your prefrontal cortex—an area of the brain involved in regulating attention—when you try to do more than one cognitively intensive task at the same time. They cite a study showing that the more people consume multiple forms of media at once (e.g., TV and smartphone), the less gray matter they have in the anterior cingulate cortex, a brain area involved in checking errors.
  Make your tasks more interesting. For example, if your work meetings are particularly boring, you can change the location, whether it’s the location of the entire meeting or which chair you sit in. Some leaders even have walking meetings or hold meetings outdoors.
  Carve out concentration time during your day. As the authors put it, “there’s often an unspoken assumption that when you aren’t in a meeting, you’re free. And yet when you need to focus, you are in an important meeting: an important meeting with yourself.” They suggest closing your door or creating a sign to let your colleagues know when you can’t be disturbed.
  Tame your wandering mind with mindfulness. The authors discuss at length the neuroscience of mindfulness and its advantages, which frequent Greater Good readers will already be familiar with. They suggest exploring mindfulness with the STOP technique, which stands for Stop, Take a breath, Observe, Proceed. This technique can be used before specific activities, in stressful situations, or as a scheduled practice.
  Managing habits

  TarcherPerigee, 2017, 336 pages
  Another way to improve your performance at work is to turn tasks—particularly tasks you don’t like or that inspire procrastination—into habits. As Fabritius and Hagemann put it, a habit is a “labor-saving device” because our brains default to habits when possible. And we can use this to our advantage.
  The key to adopting a new habit is to have a goal with emotional resonance: “The intensity of the accompanying emotion often influences the speed at which a new habit is adopted,” write the authors. “The goal you set should be specific, personal, and written down. In addition, you should have a set of action items that mark the steps leading to the goal’s completion.”
  How to get started once you have this goal? Fabritius and Hagemann describe a technique for continuous improvement called the kaizen method, which originated with the U.S military and was later adopted by Japanese businesses. Kaizen involves taking small steps toward a goal in a way that minimizes procrastination and anxiety. “The secret of kaizen is that it operates below the radar of your brain’s threat response,” the authors write. (In other words, it appears that turning a stressful task into a series of smaller, more habitual tasks may help achieve optimal arousal.) The kaizen method can be used by individual employees as well as by supervisors who want to improve an employee’s or a team’s performance.
  Building diverse teams
  The Leading Brain also provides strategies for hiring and managing employees. 
  One particularly interesting section of the book focuses on the work of Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University who specializes in the neuroscience of relationships. Combining information from surveys, an Internet dating site, and functional magnetic resonance imaging of people’s brains, Fisher has identified four basic personality styles: the Explorer, the Builder, the Negotiator, and the Director. Unlike other personality assessments, such as Myers-Briggs, these are tied to observable brain differences.
  An employer needn’t administer brain scans in order to take advantage of Fisher’s personality styles, though. Instead, Fisher has developed a tool that she calls the NeuroColor Temperament Inventory to assess personality styles.
  The authors suggest that these different personality types are associated with different skills—as well as certain affinities for other personality types—which managers can use to their advantage. “When forming a new team, you can increase productivity by balancing out the different personality styles,” they write.
  Indeed, managers can inspire their employees by motivating them to develop their strengths. The authors suggest that performance reviews, which are largely ineffective and demotivating, can be fixed by focusing on employees’ top skills rather than their weak ones. “Doing something we’re good at focuses our attention, triggers a burst of dopamine, and often puts us into a rewarding state of flow,” they write. “Working on something we’re not so good at tends to lead to discouragement, frustration, and a dissipation of energy.”
  More on Productivity
  Read an interview with Charles Duhigg on boosting productivity without sacrificing happiness.
  Follow these nine steps to achieve flow in your work.
  Learn how to take your life back from email.
  How stressed are you? Take the quiz.
  Overall, The Leading Brain is a quick and enjoyable read; however, some of the connections between the neuroscience and the business advice seem weak. In particular, some of the science discussions behind the book’s tips are oversimplified, drawing from popular-science articles and books rather than primary journal articles. And occasionally the authors have included findings that are considered problematic in the field because they have been difficult to replicate, such as a study about power poses. Sometimes they use inaccurate facts, too, such as estimating that there are 1,000 billion nerve cells in your brain, when research suggests that number is closer to 83 billion.
  Those caveats aside, The Leading Brain is a good read for someone looking for strategies to boost their work performance, as well as for leaders who are interested in new ways of thinking about how to create and manage teams. 
  Reading it even encouraged me to make some changes. I set up a morning writing habit, started a gratitude journal, and got (slightly) better at limiting my email time. I’m not sure yet how much this will improve my work performance, but at least I’m nudging my brain in the right direction

• Blogging on Business
  http://bobmorris.biz/the-leading-brain-a-book-review-by-bob-morris
  Word count: 968

  The Leading Brain: A book review by Bob Morris
  Posted on: March 19th, 2017 by bobmorris

  The Leading Brain: Powerful Science-Based Strategies for Achieving Peak Performance
  Friederike Fabricius and Hands Hagemann
  TarcherPerigee/Penguin Random House (February 2017).

  Here are several science-based strategies that can drive peak performance
  Although by no means an authority in the multiple dimensions of neuroscience, I am committed to increasing my understanding of what the brain is and does…and especially my understanding of what more it can do if given the chance. For that and other reasons, I am deeply grateful to Friederike Fabritius and Hands Hagemann for the abundance of information, insights, and counsel they provide as they examine “powerful science-based strategies for achieving peak performance.” Readers will also cherish their brilliant use of a section that concludes each of the chapters. This material will help to facilitate, indeed expedite frequent review of “Key Points.”
  For example, in Chapter 4, “Manage Habits”:
  o Our brains prefer the path of least resistance. In order to trailblazer a new neural pathway, the brain must be convinced that all that extra effort is worth it.
  o Establishing good habits and getting rid of bad ones involve the same basic skills: goal stetting and motivation, getting started, and staying on track.
  o Goals that look good on paper have no guarantee of being achieved. In order to be successful, your goal must be emotionally relevant.
  o People who don’t have an emotional stake in the process are unlikely to change. Unless they can anticipate meaningful reward or threat, they might go through the emotions but fail to make the necessary effort that change requires.
  o The biggest obstacle to getting started is procrastination. The way to outsmart the brain’s natural aversion to change is to use kaizen, which involves taking very small steps. That enables you to steadily make progress without stetting off your brain’s evolutionary alarm bells.
  o If you want to make a change that lasts, good intentions aren’t enough. You need to attach your new routine to a trigger. These trigger/routine combinations are technically referred to as implementation intentions but are better known as “if/thens” or “when/ thens.”
  In this context, I agree with Aristotle: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Also with Samuel Johnson: “The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”
  And then at the conclusion of Chapter 5, “Unleash Your Unconscious”:
  o Your unconscious runs the show. Even when you make what seems to be a conscious decision, your unconscious brain does most of the deciding. These are the key points:
  o When given limited time and limited information, experts often make better decisions. The tight restrictions force the brain to tap into the power, speed, and calculating capacity of the basal ganglia, where acquired expertise is stored.
  o Intuitive decisions made by experts are often superior to rational conclusions arrived at through conscious calculation.
  o Unlike their expert colleagues, less experienced leaders typically need more time, require more information, and usually will have to do a lot of the processing, with the help of the slower and less capacious PFC.
  o The fact that experts frequently make their best calls unconsciously can make it difficult to explain how they arrived at them. Forcing an expert to supply an after-the-fact justification for an intuitive decision may lead to hesitation and second-guessing that could underline the original action.
  o To optimize the conditions for rational processing, find a quiet corner, minimize distractions, and concentrate on the problem, solving it logically step by step.
  o If the problem you have is a creative one, your overall mood, your level of focus, and the atmosphere around you can all play a role in triggering a sudden flash of creative insight.
  o Research has shown that a sunny disposition can increase the likelihood of an “a ha!” moment. So if you’re confronted with a creative conundrum, try to make sure that you or the problem-solving team are in a good mood.
  For years, I have viewed the mind as being what the brain does and strategies as “hammers” that drive tactics, “nails.” What Friederike Fabritius and Hans Hagemann explain so well are the nature and extent of how the humans process information both consciously and unconcsciously as well as both rationally and emotionally. Obviously, no brief commentary such as mine could possibly do full justice to the scope and depth of their coverage but I hope I have at least indicated why I think so highly of them and their work.
  * * *
  I urge those who share that high regard to check out these resources: Guy Claxton’s Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less; Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow; and Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, co-authored by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool. If you really want to put some white caps on your gray matter, check out Gerald Edelman’s Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind.
  Tags: Anders Ericsson, Aristotle, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On The Matter of The Mind, Daniel Kahneman, Friederike Fabricius, Gerald Edelman, Guy Claxton, Hands Hagemann, Hare Brain [comma] Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less, Here are several science-based strategies that can drive peak performance, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Robert Pool, Samuel Johnson, TarcherPerigee/Penguin Random House, The Leading Brain: Powerful Science-Based Strategies for Achieving Peak Performance, Thinking [comma] Fast and Slow, “Manage Habits”, “Unleash Your Unconscious”

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