What is Brain Technologies Corporation?
- A publishing, training,
consulting and direct mail marketing company incorporated
in 1980. Our purpose is to assist organizations and individuals
in dealing with major change issues and needs. We are committed
to helping the individual and the organization be what they
want to be and do what they need to do in productive, satisfying
ways.
- Substantially the life
work of Dudley Lynch and Sherry Lynch, BTC's founders and
owners.
- The activities of nearly 1,000 Brain
Technologies associates more than 20 countries who have
traveled either to Fort Collins, Colorado, Denver, Colorado,
or Plano, Texas, for our BrainLab®
training/certification events or who have signed on
as Brain
Technologies Associates or BrainMap
Associates.
What is BTC's mission?
It's three-fold: (a) to discover and propagate
a better understanding of the rules and qualities for being
effective, particularly in business environments (b) to help
our clients cope competently and imaginatively with the reality
that they usually don't see the world but see
a world substantially of their own design and
projection (3) to help people and their institutions deal
constructively with rapid change.
Who uses BTC's products and services?
Our models and thinking skills tools and our
consulting and training services have been used by many of
the largest companies in the U.S., Canada and Europe as well
as by many other companies, governmental entities and educational
institutions. Also, many individuals use our products or attend
our training solely for their own growth, learning and stimulation.
Generally speaking:
- Corporate clients are
most likely to begin their use of BTC products when confronted
with the need to make rapid progress in changing their systems
and processes (not to mention their results) and upgrading
how their people think or helping them to think differently.
- Individuals are most likely
to be attracted to the BTC models and products when they
are seriously questioning whether their careers are on track
or their lives have sufficient meaning and when they are
in need of new thinking approaches, work competencies or
significant changes in personal habits and choices.
- Educational clients tend
to use our models and materials most often to encourage
their students to think outside the boxes and boundaries
of overspecialized disciplinary studies and routines.
Why does your company call itself "Brain" Technologies?
Because the founders of the company believe
that (1) today's rapidly expanding knowledge about how the
brain works can, in many cases, be effectively modeled for
use in producing more productive organizations, more competent
leadership and management, healthier work environments and
progressive, change-friendly employees (2) characterizing
these kinds of issues as "brain" issues emboldens
and challenges persons who are facing the need to think smarter,
do more with less and respond appropriately to rapidly changing
times and circumstances (3) there is an innate appeal and
arresting quality to the name (many others have told us they
like it, too).
If you know so much about changing and upgrading, after
two decades in business, why aren't you another Microsoft
?
Well, who knows exactly how to produce another
Microsoft? (Scott McNealy at Sun Microsystems, for example,
would probably trade you an arm, and maybe two, if you could
tell him.) But at BTC, as a matter of company philosophy,
mission and marketing strategy, we deliberately avoid the
broad, wide middle of the market. We like being on the cutting
edge, working with fresh-from-the-lab insights. As we said
in one of our books, "The trick is in recognizing when
you have slipped past the barbed wire fences of stability
and in being ready to perform and benefit from living and
working in the badlands of 'bounded chaos.'" One of the
truisms uncovered by the general systems-oriented human thinking
experts, in particular the
late Dr. Clare W. Graves, has been that most individuals
and organizations aren't able to consistently make big, needed
shifts in their thinking. If your company's mission is, as
is BTC's, primarily to assist those individuals and organizations
who can make or might be able to make such shifts, then you
are destined to leave the "Microsoft"-like players
in your industry to serve the needs of those who are riding
the crest of the current wave or beginning to ride it down.
Aren't your ideas, products and models too complex for many
individuals?
No, the truth is that most individuals are too
complex for the pabulum served up today by timid employers
and gun-shy corporate educators as appropriate food for thought
when it comes to dealing with a rapid-change, globally wired,
information-aggressive business environment. Our change model
so aptly explains outlooks and attitudes in people and camps
within today's organizations that it propelled one of our
books to near the top of the business-book best-seller lists
in two major European countries and languages and was a Literary
Guild alternate selection in the U.S. Students in grades as
rudimentary as junior high regularly, happily and productively
work their way through our BrainMap
thinking skills tool. So do couples using our Couples
BrainMap who are never likely to memorize the
difference between the hypothalamus and the hippocampus. It
is a major selling advantage for our products and models that
they are so approachable and applicable even as they are transporting
their users to new ideas and actions effective in today's
ever more complex world.
Do I have to come to your training or be certified before
I can use your products?
No, you do not. All our self-assessment tools
are self-administering, scored and interpreted. We worked
diligently to make them so in the interest of outfitting them
to do the most good for the largest possible audience with
as few encumbrances as possible.
What makes your self-assessment tools different from all the
others in the marketplace?
You want the spin or you want the skinny? The
spin is that they are conceptually, operationally and graphically
superior to almost any competitor's. Better utilization of
theory, better directions for the user going in, better interpretations
coming out, better design and more effective "aha!"
triggers throughout. And the skinny? The proof is in what
happens to the user once he or she has worked through a BTC
tool and has begun to ponder what it suggests about them.
One manager at General Motors has had high praise for The
BrainMap because of what she saw happening to her
people when they took it. Almost immediately, they began talking
to each other about their differences and conflicts so clearly
and unequivocally that the manager said she marveled at it
every time she witnessed it.
Which of your tools would you recommend that I start with?
It depends on how serious you are about improving
your thinking skills and change skills. The easiest of our
products to "take" and yet the most demanding to
work with is Asset
Report. The questionnaire for Asset
Report takes most users less than five minutes to complete.
You just sit down and check off your answers. But when you
get back the results to your questionnaire choices, you have
a thorough, 80-plus-page "user's manual" for all
those intensely personal skills. There's enough information
about the pluses and minuses of how you think easily to keep
you occupied for the next several months. If you want to deal
with a less demanding challenge, then start with The
BrainMap. It takes a little longer to complete and
score, but the workable picture of some of your important
thinking skills arrives for you all at once. Then you can
expand your understanding of your thinking skills and the
options available to you by working through MindMaker6,
The
mCircle Instrument and PathPrimer.
If you prefer a more in-depth and structured process,
it's time to turn to the DolphinThink
Workbook in conjunction with the first three instruments
mentioned above.
Why are BTC's models and book-length works better known in
Europe than in the U.S.?
Well, we aren't sure that this is really the
case. What is true is that the media and publishing
community, academic types and some of the think tanks of Europe
have sometimes been rather more vocal and demonstrative about
our models and tools than their counterparts in the U.S. (And
we have to admit that we have enjoyed the honorary doctorate
scene, the best-seller status, and the travel and the extending
speaking tours in that part of the world). Also to be considered
is "the European mind." Ideas get bigger billing
on the everyday discussion menu in Europe, we think, than
they tend to get in the USA, in business circles and elsewhere.
But if you'll take a moment to look at the partial
list of U.S. companies that have been clients for our
thinking skills tools, you'll see that we've also had wide
acceptance on the home front.
Can your self-assessment tools be used in "assessment
centers," where hiring candidates are being evaluated?
This is not an appropriate use for BTC's products.
The disclaimer prepared by our attorneys for Asset Report
makes clear the uses for which all our tools were created:
"Asset Report is designed and intended
solely for educational purposes, including the facilitation
of new thinking skills and the provision of other learning
opportunities for its user only." Assessment center tools
are part of the personnel process, with its specialized needs
and issues, not the learning, training, leadership, coaching,
mentoring and change process. It is not our mission at BTC
to do diagnostic workups that may focus narrowly on one aspect
of a person's nature or capabilities and ignore the fact that
there is much more to the individual's thinking skills and
potential. Instead, our mission is to unlock and assist the
ongoing development of people and their organizations on the
broadest basis possible.
Go to:
We-do-it-for-you
assessment tools
You-can-do-it-yourself
assessment tools
DolphinThink
assessment and self-instructing tools
Become
a Brain Technologies Associate
About
the BTC Models
