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Boasting a career background in the CIA and the US Army, alongside years of experience managing private equity funds as a senior vice president at GE Investments, Mike Mears brings an all-in-one guide that draws from basic human nature and behavior to provide innovative approaches and tools to great leadership.
In Certainty, Mears examines how our primitive minds operate and affect our behavior in today's office environments, reveals how uncertainty blocks progress, and offers solutions to foster productive office environments where people love to work.
Additionally, you will learn about why our neural wiring tends to focus more on threats, auto-brain and how it resists change, the many benefits of social bonding, intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, cultivating a positive and supportive work environment, cognitive biases, mistrust, mastering healthy habits, building trust, deriving employee engagement via storytelling, and much more.
Using stories, personal anecdotes, and examples, Mike Mears shows readers how to avoid the pitfalls of modern workplaces and overcome the limitations of the primitive brain to lead well-oiled functioning teams with employees who feel fulfilled and rewarded.
Certainty is for both aspiring and veteran leaders. It will help them cultivate a growth mindset that negates fear and self-doubt and discover new insights drawn from psychology and human behavior that can be applied in modern workplaces.
Furthermore, you will find prompts and exercises to use the lessons you've learned from this book in your everyday life. Mears has a meticulous eye for detail regarding how the content is presented. It makes the book not only accessible but also thoroughly engaging to read.
I found it very informative, educational, and inspirational. Highly recommended!
~ Pikasho Deka for Readers' Favorite
Not just another business manager's self-help book for increasing personal or worker productivity.
In the pages of Certainty: How Great Bosses Can Change Minds and Drive Innovation, Mike Mears offers a distinctively original, neuro-science based approach to management that will be of special appeal and value to readers with an interest in leadership and motivation.
Impressively 'reader friendly' in organization and presentation, Certainty: How Great Bosses Can Change Minds and Drive Innovation is especially and unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, corporate, and college/university library Business Management collections and supplemental MBA curriculum studies lists.
It should be noted for entrepreneurs, MBA students, corporate executives, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject.
~ Midwest Book Review
Mike Mears’ Certainty: How Great Bosses Can Change Minds and Drive Innovation takes a deep dive into the human mind and how our survival instincts shape workplace behavior.
The book is built around the idea that humans crave certainty, and uncertainty often triggers fear, resistance, and poor decision-making. Mears explores concepts like the "auto-brain," which governs instincts and emotions, and the "focused-brain," which helps us control those impulses. Through engaging anecdotes—some from his time in intelligence—he presents practical leadership strategies to build trust, inspire teams, and drive innovation.
At its core, the book argues that great leaders don’t just manage—they create a sense of psychological safety that allows people to thrive.
One of the things I really appreciated about Certainty is how it strips leadership down to the basics of human nature. It’s not just about motivational speeches or company mission statements; it’s about how our brains are wired. Mears breaks down how we spend most of our day running on instinct, often without realizing it.
His discussion on how humans resist change not out of stubbornness but because our brains are wired to see it as a threat felt like a lightbulb moment. He explains that the key to leading people through change isn’t brute force but creating a sense of security. The simplicity of that insight hit hard.
One of the book’s strengths is its clear and consistent message about how uncertainty triggers fear, reinforcing the importance of creating psychological safety. Mears emphasizes this idea throughout, ensuring it sticks with the reader. His anecdotes from intelligence and corporate leadership are captivating, offering unique insights from high-stakes environments. I appreciated the inclusion of case studies from everyday workplaces to showcase how these concepts apply across a broader range of industries.
One of my favorite sections was the one on "Mental Prompts," which provides easy, actionable ways to create a culture of certainty. The “Vision Prompts” help clarify expectations, the “Inclusion Prompts” tap into our social bonding instincts, and the “Insight Prompts” encourage creative problem-solving. Mears makes a compelling case that small, consistent behaviors like genuine recognition or making sure everyone feels included can have a massive impact on a team. The example of CIA officer Renee, who created a high-performing unit in a war zone by focusing on trust and inclusion, was powerful.
Certainty: How Great Bosses Can Change Minds and Drive Innovation is an insightful, engaging read that makes leadership feel less like a skill you have to master and more like a mindset you can adopt. If you’re a leader (or aspiring to be one) and want to understand what truly motivates people, this book is worth your time. It’s particularly great for managers in high-pressure environments, but honestly, anyone who works with people will find something useful here.
If you’ve ever been frustrated by resistance to change or struggled to inspire a team, this book will give you practical ways to flip that script. Highly recommended.
~ Literary Titan
Mike Mears’ Certainty: How Great Bosses Can Change Minds and Drive Innovation provides an insightful exploration of leadership through the lens of human nature and cognitive science.
The book begins with Mears recounting a pivotal moment in his career at the CIA, when a high-ranking official posed a seemingly simple yet profound question about management inefficacy. This question sets the stage for the book’s overarching theme: why traditional management levers often fail and how understanding the human mind can revolutionize leadership.
The narrative combines evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and workplace anecdotes to present actionable strategies for overcoming fear, building trust, and fostering creativity in teams. Mears organizes his insights into three parts: understanding primal instincts, addressing cognitive challenges, and implementing practical solutions, culminating in a set of "Mental Prompts" designed to align leadership techniques with the brain’s natural tendencies.
Mears’ background as a former CIA Chief of Human Resources lends a measure of credibility and intrigue to his work. His ability to merge real-world experiences with cognitive science is one of the book’s stronger aspects. The use of the prehistoric figure Ötzi as a metaphor for the persistence of primal instincts in modern workplaces is both clever and relatable, making complex concepts accessible to a general audience.
Certainty is a thought-provoking read for leaders, managers, and anyone interested in the intersection of psychology and organizational behavior. Its strength lies in its ability to distill complex ideas into practical advice, making it especially suitable for those new to leadership roles or seeking a fresh perspective. While seasoned leaders might find some of the content less groundbreaking, the book’s engaging narrative and actionable strategies ensure it remains a worthwhile addition to any professional’s library.
Overall, Mears provides a compelling framework for rethinking leadership—one that prioritizes empathy, trust, and alignment with the human mind.
~ Reedsy Discovery
Understanding human nature—and working with it, rather than against it—will help business leaders nurture positive relationships with their employees, writes Mears (author of NNSA Frontline Managers Guide) in this innovative resource. He first digs into the evolution of the human brain, sifting its automatic processes from what he terms the “focused brain,” where more concentrated, methodical operations take place. The problem? “Most of an employee’s, and a leader’s, day is spent in auto-brain mode,” Mears writes, making the auto-brain an ideal place to intervene to establish more successful workplace relationships.
To crystalize that concept, Mears parallels contemporary man with the mummified “Iceman” Ötzi, a 5,300-year-old body discovered by Alpine hikers in 1991. Those comparisons illustrate how little basic human survival instincts have changed over the years, a revelation that leads Mears to conclude that our brain “fails to fit with the modern workplace.” To address that issue, he outlines “less painful ways to implement change, spark creativity, and give and get feedback,” from work-related communication hints to tips on creating an inclusive workplace culture to advice for leaders on how they can create transparent relationships with their employees.
Mears writes with a light touch, infusing topics that can be sensitive with humor and sincerity, as he trains readers to navigate virtual working relationships, build trust through authentic interactions, and master the art of replacing maladaptive habits with more positive routines. With easy-to-follow steps and his recommended “Mental Prompts” (vision, inclusion, and insight prompts), Mears delivers a convincing way to build workplace connections, assuring readers that, by following his guidance, they will be "well-armed to build a great leadership legacy.” Throughout, he advocates strongly for employees while reflecting on the nuances of human nature, making this an ideal resource for creative leaders who understand that business will never achieve lasting success without first exploring the human aspects that make it tick.
Takeaway: Creative exploration of human nature’s impact on business leadership.
~ booklife Reviews
To help leaders cultivate certainty and growth mindsets in their organizations, the business guide Certainty shows how scientific and psychological insights can be leveraged toward success.
Mike Mears’s science-minded leadership guide Certainty is about workplace innovation via surpassing the autobrain’s impulse toward safety.
Knowing that people still have Stone Age brains that operate on survival instincts, this book addresses common psychological barriers in the workplace to foster understanding about how human nature impacts people’s output in their organizations. The brain is programmed to resist change, it notes, but employees will still accept change so long as it’s carried out in a way that does not trigger uncertainty. Its broad sections cover topics like the evolutionary underpinnings of the brain, the way the mind works, and problem-solving. Its chapters home in on particular concepts with clarity—for example, showing how habits beat platitudes because habits are an efficient use of brain energy.
Suggestions for dispelling uncertainty, fear, and resistance to change in the the workplace are shared with an eye toward practicality. There are also suggestions for saving time, giving feedback, and empowering one’s employees. Tools including storytelling, rewards, bonding, and visual prompts are introduced in turn to help leaders cultivate certainty and a growth mindset in their organizations, inspiring loyalty, trust, and a sense of fulfillment in their teams.
The book’s guidance aims to maximize creativity and productivity and to engineer organizational change. Its arguments are grounded in neuroscience, psychology, and career stories at workplaces including General Electric and the Central Intelligence Agency. An anecdote about a union leader’s speech at GE CEO Jack Welch’s retirement dinner is used to illustrate differing leadership philosophies. And concepts like inclusion are made tangible via stories, such as how Toyota boosted its productivity by shifting assembly lines to focus on team production. Teams became responsible for particular processes, ensuring that each worker’s mind was being engaged.
The prose is sophisticated yet clear, distilling academic insights into approachable terms. It is sometimes clouded by jargon but is engaging on the whole thanks to its creative turns of phrase: “Mistrust is baked into the human-nature cake,” it intones. And its conclusion, about leaving a legacy, reemphasizes how its tools may be used to improve organizations in a lasting manner.
Filled with psychological insights, the perspicacious leadership guide Certainty is about harnessing human nature to win people over and foster innovation.
~ Foreword Clarion