Senior managers at Sony Europe are learning how to talk to water as part of their management training. “If you talk to water and then make ice crystals you can see a difference,” explains Barend Ezechiels, sales director for Sony Netherlands. “If you talk in a friendly way, you get smooth crystals with no edges. If you talk angrily the crystals change colour and are irregular and broken, and if you talk with compassion then there is also a different structure. It is really strange. I am quite a down-to-earth guy but these things really touched me.”

Why, in one of the world’s largest and most innovative electronics firms, is an esoteric activity such as talking to water making such waves? Is it Sony’s latest approach to electronic game development? Or perhaps some new social network cyber-cult? In fact, this revelation comes as part of a ground-breaking emotional intelligence-based leadership development programme. The initiative, tailor-made for the European electronics business by Swan Consulting Services, is helping some of its most talented managers to understand how their behaviour and beliefs affect their teams.