Meet Emily and Paul: The parents of two young children, Emily is the newly promoted VP of Marketing at a large corporation while Paul works from home or from clients' offices as an independent IT consultant. Their lives, like all of ours, are filled with a bewildering blizzard of emails, phone calls, meetings, projects, proposals, and plans. Just staying ahead of the storm has become a seemingly insurmountable task. We travel inside their brains as they attempt to sort vast quantities of information, prioritize it, memorize it, and act on it. Fortunately for Emily and Paul, they're in good hands: David Rock knows how the brain works-and more specifically, how it works in a work setting. He shows how it's possible for Emily and Paul, and thus the reader, not only to survive in today's overwhelming work environment but succeed in it-and still feel energized and accomplished at the end of the day. The Brain at Work explores such issues as: why our brains feel so taxed, and how to maximize our mental resources; why changing behavior is so difficult-and how to make it less so; why focusing on problems doesn't seem to create the desired change; how concentration and focus change the brain, and how to maintain energy and productivity at work; why providing critical feedback is so difficult, and how to make it easier; how corporate/office culture is formed and can most effectively be altered.