Business is Emotional
Emotions are the invisible current that powers all human interaction...
They motivate people to act, communicate, and make decisions.
Organisational procedures and processes are shaped, negotiated, rejected, reformed, argued over, or celebrated as a result of feelings.
Emotions determine the success or failure of a
career, and they drive growth, competition, and change within organisations.
Be the First to Know
Sign up for updates about my upcoming book...
You'll get:
-
Publication dates and launch announcements
-
Exclusive previews and sample chapters
-
Invitations to webinars and live Q&A sessions
No spam. Just thoughtful updates
Strategy sounds simple...
until pride, politics and people get involved
Imagine you’ve spent hours reading books about farming, studying agriculture, flipping through issues of Farmers Weekly, and looking at photos of various breeds of cows.
Despite all this knowledge, nothing quite prepares you for the stink that greets you when you step into a cowshed.
In other words, theory and reality are two different things. The same principle applies to the corporate world. You can immerse yourself in the latest business books, study for an MBA, and read every article in the Harvard Business Review, but none of this will prepare you for the ‘emotional stink’ and office politics that permeate every large organisation or corporate cowshed.
People in organisations are often very good at talking about strategy, values and mission, but rarely talk about the feelings that make these things happen.
The buzz so far...
"Organisational failures rarely spring from faulty code or dusty strategy. They germinate in emotional currents no dashboard tracks and quietly corrode resilience and create opportunities for attacks from the inside.
In The Emotional Life of Organisations, Dr Mike Drayton and Paul Fisher follow incidents from factory floors to intelligence centres, showing how a single bruised ego can rupture safeguards and undermine operations faster than any hostile actor. Their accessible neuroscience lays out how respect levels, stress and ambiguity skew hormones until judgement buckles and teams either lock tight or shear apart at the moment unity is required.
Conversely, purposeful joy and psychological safety emerge as the countervailing force, converting emotional capital into renewable energy that fuels problem-solving and forward drive. Reading these pages made immediate sense of nights I have spent in situation rooms, when fatigue thinned tempers and critical decisions turned on whether someone felt heard or respected. The authors give language and structure to those half-seen dynamics, explaining why a team can swing from sharp coherence to catastrophic drift in minutes and, just as quickly, recover with a well-timed dose of levity.
Each chapter closes with reflection prompts that turn insight into practice. By the final chapter, operators want to read cortisol spikes as readily as network logs, and boards are reminded that culture now sits beside cyber and physical assets as infrastructure to defend. In high-pressure environments, that insight is priceless."
Sebastian Bassett-James
UK Cabinet Office
“Feelings and emotions are not topics commonly associated corporate strategy, but Michael masterfully details how central they are to the workplace. He explores how emotions drive decisions, negotiations and their impact to corporate culture. The book not only presents real world examples of how emotions have impacted various organisations but it uses psychological observations from Freud to Kahneman in to highlight the root cause of historical mishaps in decision making while providing a roadmap to learn from them.
From the role of emotions in negotiations and feedback interpretation to the value of emotional granularity in workplace relationships, the book offers invaluable insight into how emotions impact so many aspects of an organisation as well practical roadmap to applying those insights. Its relevance to the modern workplace cannot be overstated.“