Without descending too much into left- and right-brained people (which I think is reductionist), many businesspeople feel that relationships, the heart, and love are soft constructs as opposed to analysis, numbers, and spreadsheets. Heart versus head.

The truth, as usual, is much more complex. I ask you executives: how many of your business failures have occurred because of a bad analysis or spreadsheets? OK—now compare that number to the number of failures that have occurred because of bad relationships. Unless your firm is very different from those I know, the second number, failure through relationships, will be far larger than the first number.

To name but a few of these failures, consider the failures in your mergers and acquisitions, in your outsourcing contracts, in your alliances, in your strategic account management, and in your firm’s overall management (and these are only a few examples). Relationships are the underpinning of your firm. What seems soft is very very hard when it leads to failure.

For those managers who see relationships as too soft, who try to maintain a “rational distance” from co-workers, this is bad news. As Daniel S. Hanson says, in his Cultivating Common Ground: Releasing the Power of Relationships at Work, “The truth is, it is impossible to separate the heart from the head just as it is impossible to separate relationships with work. Even if we could separate them, it is doubtful that it would be good for us or our work.” JSperry