Reviewed by Mary Case

Why would a management consultant care passionately about a book which reveals how the brain works, specifically the brains of American school children? Mama, your children grow up to be cowgirls, curators, chiropractors, and comptrollers. Mel Levine?s A Mind at a Time gives us a way to think about the individual strengths and weaknesses to be discovered in the people we work with and for, and attempt to recruit to contribute to our successful workplaces.

Levine is a splitter. He?s developed a comprehensive, specific, and yes, complicated way of looking at learning, all of which obviously moves from the classroom to the workroom. Attention Controls are split into the mental energy controls of alertness, mental effort, sleep-arousals, and consistency. Information intake include selection, depth and detail, mind activity, span, and satisfaction. Output controls cover previewing information, options, pace, reinforcement, and quality or the ability to evaluate. And then the brain stores data in various kinds of memory and manipulates it in out language processing facilities. Understanding each of these small parts (with big effects) on the person is Levine?s life long quest and we?re all the better for it.

Reviewing brain research (some of which he conducts as a professor of pediatrics at the University of North Carolina Medical School) Levine makes a strong case for understanding our children as individuals and designing educational programs for each America?s child.

Isn?t that what we?re being told to do with our marketing programs—mass marketing to the individual? Relationship building, one at a time. Levine lays out ways to evaluate the child and then design a program to support individual learning. Nonprofit leaders, fundraisers, and marketeers will find useful models. Levine?s work with children can and I believe should be adapted to the grownup nonprofit sector.