Top management are busy enlarging market share, becoming customer-oriented, cutting costs, getting better returns from their investments in staff. In the Human Resources department, the challenges are to help attract and retain talented staff; to keep them loyal and create learning communities. Those departmental professionals are creating a perfomance culture and building a community through teams that work. Ask the rest of the staff and the goals change, perhaps from wanting management to talk straight, build trust and listen. Bringing such diverse interests together can appear a daunting task, until you use your brain, according to Tony Buzan, author of The Brainsmart Leader. "We use the term Brainsmart Leader' to describe those who apply brain principles to business issues," he explains. He cites the example of former IBM executive David Bannon, who started applying Buzan's ideas during IBM's crisis years. "The first task he faced was to teach people how to deal with change. "As well as setting goals and defining success, he needed to prioritise and get the rest of the team to share this vision." Now corporate controller at Entex Information Services, coping with change was the key to Bannon's business vision. He states in the book: "If you take process analysis skills, an understanding of the customer and your supplier, add some creativity, and get people communicating and working in teams, it all ties together. "That is the formula for success." Not that it was easy. "People were paralysed in the beginning. They were afraid of change. We needed to figure out a way of helping them." Bannon and Tony Dottino, consultant and co-author of The Brainsmart Leader, developed Process Innovation Through Teams (PITT) workshops to help staff analyse what they do, improve communications and be more creative. Bannon told his staff: "Either we're going to be a change agent and effect change or we're going to be its victims. "I used to guarantee everyone that we would either all be doing something different within six months or we would all be doing the same thing differently." {{PEOPLE MOVES }}