MindTech | About Manny Elkind

Mansfield (Manny) Elkind

Balancing and blending productivity, creativity
and work satisfaction are keys to sustaining individual
and organizational success over the long term.

Manny is President and founder of MindTech. He works with organizations to align vision, strategy and organizational values with the interests, skills, and core values of individuals. He accomplishes this with workshops, personal coaching and team building that uses leading edge methods to improve flexible thinking and strategic thinking skills.

During his long and distinguished career at Polaroid, Manny was a senior manager who led manufacturing and development teams. While in these roles, he experimented with new ways of blending productivity, creativity and work satisfaction. He concluded that creating change within ourselves and developing our human talent is a prerequisite for business success and life satisfaction. This led him to explore ways of accelerating human development to improve leadership, creativity and relationships. He founded MindTech in 1988 to continue this work.

More than 50,000 people from business, medicine, education and government have attended his programs.

Manny has a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate Business School, where he also teaches executive development programs. He is certified as a Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Psychology (NLP) and is an Associate of Herrmann International and the Consensus Management Group. His major hobby is landscape design and he lives in Sharon, Massachusetts.

A good way to understand Manny a little better is to review his HBDI thinking preference profile and his most important values at work. They are shown below.

The profile above describes Manny's thinking preferences. Thinking preferences are the ways of thinking that are most satisfying and come more naturally at this point in life. Thinking preferences can be different than skills or behavior. Thinking preferences often change over time as a result of significant emotional experiences, life transitions and other kinds of important insights.

Any point in the profile in the outer two rings is a preference. A point in the outer ring is a very strong preference that is usually noticed and more obvious to other people. Manny's preferences are primarily visionary (yellow), with interpersonal (red) next and rational (blue) as the third. He gets the most satisfaction from the visionary and interpersonal perspectives. He gets the least satisfaction from the detailed organizing perspective (green). However, the detail and organizing in green continues to be a skill area that was developed when he was leading manufacturing and development groups at Polaroid.

So, he most enjoys paying attention to the big picture, stretching the boundaries of what's possible, developing relationships to make things happen while keeping things rational and practical. In other words, he likes to keep his head in the clouds while his feet are planted solidly on the ground.

Manny's Values in the context of work are listed in order of priority:

1. Joy
2. Making a difference
3. Relationships
4. Integrity

Here's how his values guide him at work:

Integrity is present for Manny when people:

• Do what they say they will do.
• Say what they believe, think and feel in the moment.
• Listen to the perspectives of others.
• Consider the welfare of others as well as their own welfare when making decisions.

Integrity is likely to lead to great Relationships.
Relationships are present for Manny when people:

• Tell others their more personal thoughts and feelings.
• Listen to and ask questions about each other's thoughts and feelings.
• Say and do things that help each other.
• Initiate contact.

Relationships are likely to lead to Making a difference.
Making a difference is present for Manny when:

• He sees or hears from people that they are functioning more effectively and with greater satisfaction as a result of something he has done, said or accomplished.
• He hears about or sees concrete things accomplished that happened primarily because of his influence.

Making a difference is more likely to lead to Joy.
Joy is an inner state that also has a spiritual component for Manny. That inner state is present for relatively short moments and is worth all the effort that is necessary to experience it.

Therefore, the values that are most important to him are more likely to become available through the door of giving and getting Integrity.

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