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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

One of my clients is a newly merged company. To prepare for the engagement, I did what any self-respecting consultant would do: I called people who have been through a merger themselves.

One related this bizarre story: The leaders of one of two merging companies organized a formal “war school” to game out ways to end up in control of the new company. My source was quite angry about this, considering it unethical and subversive, not to mention sneaky.

Conducting a formal war school is certainly over the top (and made my source’s life quite difficult for a year or two as well). The underlying motivation, though, is predictable, and perhaps even laudable, the result of intense desire to beat the competition.

In the case at hand, one company’s executives considered the merger an opportunity to create a new company with enhanced capabilities and economies of scale. The executives in the other company considered it a stratagem for beating a competitor, albeit not in the marketplace. This might make them untrustworthy; it doesn’t make them unethical. “Untrustworthy” is predictive and therefore useful; “unethical” simply moralizes — a hollow luxury in the executive suite.

The odds are high you’ll go through a merger or acquisition yourself. What should you do? Let’s write some code (it’s going to look like PL/1 — it’s been a long time since I’ve written real code, I’m afraid):

IF [Your future in the merged organization is secure] OR [You’ve been guaranteed a generous severance package] THEN [Concern yourself entirely with making sure the merger succeeds] ELSE;

IF [You expect those leading the merger to reward those who help make it happen through promotions, bonuses and continued employment while making other arrangements for those who resist it] THEN [Concern yourself entirely with making sure the merger succeeds] ELSE;

[Don’t be a schmuck];

Those leading a merger are responsible for aligning the personal best interests of managers and employees with the merger’s success. What’s your role in helping the process?

Don’t ask anyone who works for you to be self-sacrificing..

IF [You want everyone working for you to help the merger succeed] THEN [Make it worth their while to do so] AND [Make sure they know it will be worth their while];

What — you expect them to be loyal to a new employer they don’t know, who shows no interest in being loyal to them?

Don’t be a schmuck.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

If you want to know why practitioners of the hard sciences sometimes sneer at social scientists, look no farther than the popular book Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. In it, Goleman presents a groundbreaking discovery: People who are socially graceful enjoy more success than people who are intellectually brilliant but socially inept. This unexpected insight was, until Goleman’s book, known only to high school nerds, IT professionals who report to “a suit,” and those who read Dilbert and actually get the joke.

I have a problem with Emotional Intelligence (measured by something Goleman calls “EQ”), not because it’s wrong, but because it’s dumb.

To be fair, my criticisms of this book are in the domain of the purely rational. As Goleman points out, we’ve overemphasized the importance of rationality, the trait that separates us from every other species on the planet, and underemphasized the importance of our emotional selves. I guess that means we ought to base our evaluation of this book on whether it makes us feel good.

But I just can’t bring myself to endorse a book that so hopelessly confuses description with prescription.

Goleman’s description is correct, although so obvious one wonders why anyone would bother buying a book to understand it. Put succinctly, it’s that if you want to succeed you have to get along with people. It’s an accurate statement; one made in this space many times. If you want a successful career, pay attention.

But Goleman takes it a step beyond, to the Panglossian conclusion that this is a good thing. Maybe it is, although I have a hard time agreeing that we should downplay facts and logic in favor of something any baboon can master … literally!

Here’s the point Emotional Intelligence should have made: We tend to hire and promote those with superior social graces over those who excel at their work, and buy from the sales representative with the best haircut, firmest handshake, most resonant voice and tasteful clothes. But that’s a very bad way to behave, and with training we can learn to overcome it.

Or as I once explained to a hiring manager who reported to me, I’d rather apologize for my technicians’ poor manners than for their lack of competence.

Of course, had Goleman made this point instead, Emotional Intelligence wouldn’t have become a best-seller and he wouldn’t have become as successful as he has.

Which just goes to show that if nothing else, Goleman eats his own cooking.

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