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Preface

An ad in the Wall Street Journal in the mid-eighties showed the head of a Greek statue. Its nose had either fallen off or been broken off. The caption read: "Sometimes when you keep your nose to the grindstone, all you get is a flat nose." In the words of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, "Let's not talk about working harder. Everyone is already working their hardest. Work smarter." I hope that Brain Dancing will help you work smarter by optimizing strategic mental processes performed frequently in your work. Most of us are doing the best we can. The key is to learn how to improve what our best is.

The term "Brain Dancing" originated out of my efforts to describe the mental synergy that results from mobilizing right-brain thought processes, especially in those individuals who habitually favor the left side. Right-brain creativity gives the left side more and better ideas to analyze. The disciplined structure of the left provides a framework for organizing these ideas and coming up with questions that stimulate additional creativity. The result is a dynamic loop between the two hemispheres – a "br ain dance." As you will discover, this metaphor has evolved over the past five years to include additional oscillations that are not necessarily between left and right-brain thinking.

Working on technical projects for dozens of companies has been my laboratory for testing the usefulness of various self-development techniques. These projects include the Boeing 777, multi-million dollar real estate deals for Weyerhaeuser and over three years of software-related projects at Microsoft.

While my goal was to write a book to help readers build technical capacity, the resulting ideas seem to be useful in a wide variety of contexts. Rapid technological change has forced people in all industries to become lifelong learners.

Patrick Magee
Bellevue, Washington

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