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 According to University of Chicago professor Harry Davis, disruptive innovations “typically come from individuals outside of the mainstream who lack conventional academic credentials.”
Paul Herr's wide-ranging academic training provides the perfect background for someone destined to turn conventional bureaucratic management on its head. Herr could not have written Primal Management without his eclectic background in engineering (BS), geology (MS), business (MBA), and psychology (coursework toward a PhD).
Herr's book contains an innovation of the disruptive type. His solution to our economic woes will involve a paradigm shift as opposed to a minor tweak of the existing system. His ideas are disruptive in a good way--disruptive to self-serving hyper-rational thinking that treats human beings like pawns on a chess board.
Herr's disruptive innovation can put companies that opt in years ahead of the competition. It is both a business innovation (survey, metrics and employee engagement methodology) and a scientific innovation (his social-appetite theory of motivation). It also aligns with the burgeoning new field of neuroeconomics.
This idea is a gem, a world-class idea with the potential to reshape the corporate landscape. It is simultaneously simple, logical, scientifically-advanced and an easy sell to busy corporate executives because it brings clarity and rigor to the murky realm of human motivation. Simplicity, clarity and rigor are key components of Herr's value-added proposition. If you can find a simpler or more compelling description of human nature, I suggest you jump on it. If not, then it's time to join Herr's natural-management revolution!
Paul Herr (Madison, WI) is a consultant, scientist, entrepreneur, and inventor who provides employee engagement services to corporations. He invented the Horsepower SurveyTM, an innovative tool for measuring the power of a company's motivational engine and developed the social appetite concept that lies at the heart of his book.
An Engineering Approach to MotivationHerr first began exploring the soft subject of emotion in 1977 as an engineering student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In other words, his perspective on emotion has always been hard and rational.
The engineering qualities of the human body always impressed him. The human hand, for example, is a beautifully crafted tool that engineers have yet to duplicate. The same goes for the human eye, human heart, or any other aspect of our biology. Then the thought occurred to Herr, "What about emotion? Where is the survival logic in a system that causes people to jump off bridges, experience road rage and go postal?" Deep down, he felt, there must be an elegant and logical system at work here and he devoted his life to figuring it out.
Bit by bit, the pieces fell into place, and a sketch of the motivational mechanism emerged. After thirty years of trying to reverse engineer human emotions, Herr believes he’s done it--cracked nature's code and uncovered the deep architecture of motivation. As Herr suspected in 1977, this mechanism is simple, elegant and is involved in every thought and every act that humans being make. Herr hopes readers will enjoy his engineering perspective on motivation.
Pioneer in the Neuroeconomic Revolution
Herr began working on a PhD in Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin in 1986. After his first semester, Herr met with his advisor to pick a thesis topic. Herr told his advisor, “I want to explore the connection between emotional incentives and academic achievement.” If we can turn on the natural pleasures of learning, Herr reasoned, students should become self-motivated and hence more successful.
Herr’s thesis advisor disagreed. He said it would be career suicide to do a thesis on emotion. The department, he explained, was dominated by cognitive psychologists who viewed the brain as a computer-like mechanism. We do not have room for emotions in our rational formulation of human behavior. Herr thought to himself, “This is precisely what is wrong with education today. It disrespects the motivational engine that drives human achievement.” Herr terminated his PhD program after one semester to pursue an MBA at the University of Chicago.
Shortly after Herr’s advisor told him that emotions didn't matter, a technological innovation occurred that dramatically changed how the scientific community viewed emotions. PET scanners and functional MRI machines were invented that allowed scientists to peer into the brain and see emotions occurring in real time. This technological breakthrough triggered a renaissance of interest in emotion and a string of important discoveries. Emotion research was converted from an intellectual backwater into one of the hottest fields in science. A new consensus has emerged that emotions reside at the core of human nature, the core of economic decision making, the core of customer satisfaction, and the core of employee engagement. Not only are emotions important, they are the fundamental forces that make us go, and without them we’d be dead. Human beings, it seems, are primarily emotional and secondarily rational. Herr found it gratifying to witness this revolution take place and to see his thesis advisor proven wrong.
The next revolution will occur in the business community as the brain science revolution triggers a management revolution. This revolution has already commenced. It is called neuroeconomics. Economists have teamed up with brain scientists to investigate how human beings make economic decisions. Neuroeconomists have found that there is only one way to reward human beings--with rewarding feelings emanating from a brain structure called the basal striatum.
If you reward human beings with money, food, a pat on the back, or with addictive drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine, the basal striatum lights up on brain scans. This research indicates that feelings are the true currency of the human mind--a concept Herr elaborates on in Primal Management. The business community has made fun of emotions for 100 years. They were viewed as soft, irrational and unbusinesslike. Herr wrote Primal Management to turn this wrong-headed thinking upside down by proving that emotions are the fundamental forces that make us go.
Herr not only reports on the brain-science revolution in Primal Management, he is also an active participant and theorist; a pioneer of sorts.
Education/Experience
BS Degree in Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1977 Masters Degree in Geology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1980 PhD-level coursework Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1986 MBA from the University of Chicago, 1988 Practical Experience: I have worked for both large (Shell Oil) and small companies (small business owner) over the course of my career in both technical and managerial roles. I have also worked internationally in Germany and China. Most recently, I have worked as a management consultant helping companies develop people-friendly ecosystems populated with engaged employees.
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I hope to ignite a revolution in management thinking with Primal Management. I basically want to prove to the business community, once and for all, that it is far more efficient to manage with the carrot than with the stick.
