Gill Oliver talks to a woman said to have one of the finest business brains in the world

Physicist and philosopher Danah Zohar is much in demand. She has lectured executives at some of the world’s top organisations including Shell, Motorola, the Cabinet Office of the previous government and space agency NASA.

Voted “one of the world’s hundred best business brains” by the Financial Times, the Eynsham-based scientist is also the author of eight books.

Despite this, her theory that quantum physics is the key to better leadership skills, is viewed with scepticism in some quarters.

She explained: “When I arrived to speak at NASA’s headquarters, I was told my audience was hostile.

“Apparently, they were asking, ‘is she some sort of new-age quack or something?’.

“So I opened my talk with, ‘look guys, I know you think I am crazy but...’.”

In fact, the American-born scientist is no hippy-dippy mystic, as her eye-popping list of academic achievements prove.

She studied physics and philosophy at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and topped it off with a postgraduate degree at Harvard.

She points out that quantum mechanics, the basic scientific theory of the way the world works, was formulated at the beginning of the 20th century by scientists including Einstein and replaced those based on the 17th-century ideas of Galileo and Newton.

The biggest difference, Ms Zohar says, is that quantum mechanics describes the dynamics of ideas, while the old theory describes the dynamics of machines.

She said: “Quantum mechanics is relevant to 21st-century business management because modern firms are driven by rapidly changing ideas, rather than by slowly changing material factors.

“Therefore, understanding the dynamics of ideas is essential.

“People in today’s companies are better understood and treated as conscious creators and implementers of ideas, rather than as programmable machines.

“Quantum mechanics provides an understanding of the mind-brain connection that is not only completely in accord with intuition and common sense but that also describes the way in which mind-brain processes act to fashion the activities of our brains in the service of our ideas.”

Her desire to challenge accepted theories and discover things for herself started early.

She pointed out: “I am an intellectual but it goes far back, to before my university days.

“After being introduced to the atom in my junior high school class, it fired my imagination so that as a teenager, I would build all sorts of weird and wonderful things in my bedroom to try out experiments.

“I was asking all the big questions that kids that age do, such as Why am I here?, Where do I come from? Why do I have to die? and answering in terms of ideas derived from quantum physics.”

It was a rather different story from the one she heard from her devoutly Christian parents and their church and her rapidly increasing scientific insights meant she lost faith in that religion by the time she was 13.

And although one of her books is called Finding God in Physics, she never regained it.

She has “tried all the world’s religions”, converting to Judaism while at university and taking up Buddhism later.

She added: “Spiritual intelligence is deeper than religion and it’s what makes us invent religion.

“We are a story-telling species. The trouble is, we have forgotten they are just stories.”

Most of her books were written jointly with her husband Ian Marshall, an Oxford-educated physicist and philosopher who died three years ago.

“We did everything together. He had this mega brain that remembered everything he ever read,” she said.

Three years ago, she moved from Bainton Road in North Oxford, where they lived for 25 years, to West Oxfordshire to be closer to one of their two grown-up children.

Her life has been colourful and full of action.

While in her 20s, she went to live in Israel and became active in left-wing politics.

She later spent time working as an investigative journalist for The Sunday Times, which included writing about Chinese triads in the capital.

Her then fiancé was so worried about her personal safety, he convinced her to ask her editor if she could write about science instead.

Her ‘Road to Damascus moment’ came when recovering from an operation in hospital in the mid-1980s and mulling over some of the theories she and her husband were working on.

She explained: “It suddenly occurred to me that if Ian was right, it changed absolutely everything.

“I had the nurses prop me up in the bed and started scribbling the outline for my first book.”

The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics was published in 1990.

A steady stream of titles followed, including: ReWiring the Corporate Brain: Using the New Science to Rethink How We Structure and Lead Organisations; Who’s Afraid of Schrödinger's Cat?; SQ: Spiritual Intelligence, the Ultimate Intelligence; and Spiritual Capital: Wealth We Can Live By.

She believes many of capitalism’s negative features are down to the fact that the paradigm for leadership and management thinking is based on Isaac Newton’s older physics and is, therefore, outdated.

“The point is that the old ideas influence our ideas about absolutely everything,” she pointed out. Something new is on offer now. We don’t need the old conflict and confrontation, we need co-operation and consensus.”

She is convinced that current government strategy to downplay funding for humanity degrees is wrong-footed.

She explained: “The idea that education is only good for what work you can do with it is outdated.”

Although she is 69, she says she “feels more like 45” and enjoys jetting off all over the world to give lectures and run workshops.

A month ago, she was the guest speaker at a Russian conference for female professionals and academics.

She said: “I have always thought of myself as an honorary man but there were 1,000 women who came from all over Europe.

“They were amazing and it blew my mind.”

Some of her activities are here in Oxfordshire and she has training courses planned for next month and later in the year.

She prefers to teach them herself, rather than delegate, because she believes so strongly in her message.

“We all need to take on more responsibility for our societies and our souls,” she said.

“Everything is related to everything else, so the actions I take reverberate across the whole universe and it’s the same for all of us. It’s not crazy and it’s not new age, it’s the way of the future.”