If you've ever felt ignored as a customer, humiliated by a teammate, drained by workplace politics, or painfully isolated in a big company, then you've experienced the business effects of emotional disconnection. In today's knowledge-driven and service centered economy, emotional excellence isn't idealism. It is a practical necessity for growth and retaining superior talent. The Industrial Revolution is over, and the Emotional Revolution has now begun. Recognizing that emotion is part of the fabric of human biology, the hundred billion neurons in every brain can be emotionally engaged to: ¿ Evoke intense customer passion to boost sales ¿ Eliminate the financial self-destruction of infighting ¿ Excite employees to care for each other to ensure effectiveness Written for anyone from the small business employee to the corporate CEO, this step-by step guidebook contains dozens of practical checklists and examples to immediately create connection with customers and colleagues. If you get the emotions right, you get the business right.

Emotional Business

Inspiring Human Connectedness to Grow Earnings and the EconomyBy Ravi Rao

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Ravi Rao, MD, PhD, MEd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-2617-0

Contents

Preface: The Author's Journey........................................ixChapter One: The One-Handed Civilization.............................1Chapter Two: Descartes Was Wrong.....................................20Chapter Three: RSTUVWX...............................................34Chapter Four: Hurricane in a Closet..................................53Chapter Five: Get on the Same Page Now...............................73Chapter Six: Emotion as Business Strategy............................91Chapter Seven: It's Really Bad around Here...........................130Chapter Eight: Change the Oil in Seven Languages.....................143Chapter Nine: The Ear Is Mightier than the Sword.....................155Chapter Ten: We Live in Four Boxes...................................174Chapter Eleven: The Good News........................................190Appendix: All the Lists in One Place.................................195About the Author.....................................................213Additional Reading...................................................215Contacting Dr. Ravi Rao..............................................217

Chapter One

The One-Handed Civilization

Several millennia ago, in a place now forgotten by the memory of time, an empire existed unlike any other.

On one fateful day, when the mighty ruler had ventured for a walk outside of his palace, a scorpion bit him and caused his right hand to become permanently paralyzed. Despite his distinguished record of bravery and phenomenal intellect, the limitation of his hand movements led him to doubt himself. He worried that his hand would attract more attention than his leadership.

In an effort to appease the insecure nature of their emperor, the clerics and his elite inner circle began to adapt the palace environment for him. Doors were adjusted to utilize left-handed movement. Small tools and eating utensils were reshaped to his convenience.

Still feeling awkward in the company of others, the emperor was pleased when the smaller improvements of the castle architecture were later accompanied by an unspoken rule that all servants, guards, and citizens should use only their left hand when in the company of the emperor. Every individual knew that to risk using both right and left meant offending the ruler and perhaps incur harsh repercussions. One-handed action was the only acceptable action.

It was not long after that the left-handed conventions propagated beyond the walls of the palace into the villages and vast regions of the empire. The mighty emperor served as a model for others in all respects of his life, so the thinking went, and as such his paralysis was interpreted to be either divine intervention or the basis of a new code of conduct for everyone to follow.

The emperor's long life sustained the expectation for one-handed activity over the ensuing decades. Profound changes were seen in both grand and granular aspects of daily living. Cooking, cleaning, tending to animals, caring for children, handshake greetings, and tasks of ordinary existence were done with only the left hand.

Slowly, generations began to internalize the one-handed expectation as accepted code of behavior, and not simply an obligation to follow. Parents scolded young children if they reached for objects with their right hand. Mentors trained their apprentices in left-handed skilled trades. Leaders and intellectuals promoted the inferior nature of the right side. Merchants only offered left-handed products.

Those involved in agriculture and carpentry silently questioned the wisdom of the unilateral restriction on their vocations. Activists pointed to the biological minority of individuals born left-handed as an argument for creating right-handed strategies. Some bold heretics implored, "Surely there must be a better way," but their suggestions were met with disapproval by those elites who preferred the stability of unnatural restrictions to following inherent human tendencies.

The emperor died many decades later, but by then the citizens had forgotten why they had originally switched to the left-only way of living. His demise did not trigger the demise of a cultural norm throughout the empire. The one-handed civilization continued even after his death for other emperors. People had, over time, simply accepted that one entire side of their body was somehow inferior to the other side and lived in accordance with that belief.

The one-handed civilization persisted for many years until the evolving needs of humanity and threats from other empires forced change. Warfare, and then rebuilding after war, required two-handed effort. Out of desperation to survive, people reexamined their historical inclinations. They questioned whether their aspirations would not be better served by using both right and left hands.

The one-handed civilization is a mythical fable invented to illustrate a weighty idea: an entire culture can be, for a variety of reasons, led to believe something that is neither in its best interests nor aligned with the instincts of the human species. It may, over time, begin to unquestioningly accept a false premise. The ramifications of such thinking can be profound, pervasively affecting many elements of people's lives. Such blind allegiance to legacy ideas is eventually reexamined only when it is clear that survival is at stake.

Our Own One-Handed Civilization

The premise of Emotional Business is that a similar tale can be written about the way humans have constructed companies since the advent of industrialization. In the past two centuries, we have not improperly separated right from left; rather, we have accepted the improper separation of business success from emotional success. While the separation may have served well the needs of business owners and shareholders for multiple generations, blind allegiance to separating emotions from business now threatens the viability of businesses everywhere. Importantly, emotional excellence must be recognized as an addition to the fundamentals of a successful business, not a substitute for what ensures business success today. Business success and emotional success are the separated right and left hands of the modern global economy; we need both to be successful.

The schism between business activities and emotional experience is pervasive in modern times. From the frontline clerk to the CEO, the modern worker (in both Eastern and Western cultures) has been indoctrinated to suppress the human brain's emotional instincts in favor of remaining dispassionate, disengaged, and even disingenuous in order to succeed professionally.

At the executive level, leaders have been conditioned to ignore crucial emotional information—the inadequacies within the customer experience, the flawed emotional dynamics of the management team, the inefficiencies arising from conflicted business units, the relationship wounds from a plant closure or new corporate acquisition, the lack of integrative values within the company—such that metrics solely drive decisions despite the intrinsic incompleteness of data. The unemotional upper echelon is driven by numerical outputs. Ignorance of underlying emotions can lead to catastrophic failure of a new initiative or merger or operational system, but this fact is not always recognized.

Individual leaders also face a false...