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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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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Usually, I get the joke.

I don’t always think it’s funny, but at least I get it. Not always, though — in a recent column I reported on the antics of a certain “Dr. Richard Paley, teacher of Divinity and Theobiology, Fellowship University,” who exposed all of us in IT as Darwinians, atheists and pagans. As a number of readers were kind enough to explain, “Dr. Paley” is a satire. In my defense, The Register reported the story as fact, a Hoaxbusters search came up empty, and I did find it hilarious. I just didn’t realize it was supposed to be.

Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection appears in this column on a regular basis. This isn’t because “Survival Guide” is related to “Survival of the Fittest.” The latter phrase, never used by Darwin himself, comes from Herbert Spencer’s ludicrous theory of “Social Darwinism” — ludicrous because it considered fitness to be absolute, justifying hereditary aristocracy as the consequence of natural superiority.

In Darwinian theory, fitness is contextual, measuring how well a heritable trait fits specific conditions. That’s a concept you can take to the bank when managing your career: Success comes from how well you adapt to circumstances. There are no panaceas, which means we can all ignore the 90% or so of all business pundits who sell “the answer” without first hearing the question.

This same philosophy can help you plot a course for your IT organization. I’ve read various authorities expound on the proper role of IT in business. Some call for strategic partnership, some consider IT’s proper role to be a service provider, while yet others think we’re an “information utility.” If they understood modern evolutionary theory, they’d spend less time advocating one or another as the right answer, and more assessing which circumstances each of these very different models is best suited to.

Evolutionary theory applies to all situations in which entities compete, which means we in business can benefit from a century and a half of scientific research. To take just one example:

The estimable Richard Dawkins has argued that natural selection is a competition among genes, not whole organisms — that an organism is just a gene’s way of succeeding. This insight simplifies the apparently mystifying behavior of companies that self-destruct while creating “shareholder value.” Substitute gene for shareholder and organism for company and everything suddenly makes sense –plenty of bodies are designed to die in order to help their genes succeed.

The lesson for you: Shareholder value and your own best interests don’t necessarily coincide. Plan accordingly.

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