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This is a very useful book for senior managers and those consultants working with boards in the corporate sector where emotional intelligence is under-valued. It is clearly and simply written and has good diagrams. It is exciting, since it brings the explicit use of feelings into the boardroom's strategic decision-making.
The book is split into four parts: entrepreneurial self-reflection; creating a successful team, strategic decision-making, and finally, implementation and changing culture.
In the first part Nagel looks at how rational approaches to decision making and strategy formation are affected by unconscious emotional factors. She uses attachment theory with its distinctive attachment patterns to understand how formative experiences give rise to a model of self. She shows how different models of the self correspond with making entrepreneurial and business related decisions as well as with management behaviour. In particular, she demonstrates through case study material how those who are insecurely attached show specific types of behaviour when making strategic decisions and when interacting with their management teams.
Nagel emphasises the four core areas that preoccupy most people: closeness and relationship, attachment, autonomy, and identity, and analyses how these impact on the capacity to form relationships. This is in order to demonstrate how far conscious and unconscious feelings shape decision-making and how thinking and feeling cannot be separated from each other despite the prevailing view among senior executives that their decision-making is completely rational.
Her argument is that if emotions are always present in decision-making then it makes more sense to try consciously to integrate them into the process than to split them off and deny them. Antonio Damasio's work on consciousness research elaborates the way in which feelings are bodily expressions of thoughts and therefore closely related. The concept of the “somatic marker”—that is a negative g