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Promotional intelligence
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June 28, 1999 |
To drive this point home, Goleman recounted the story of a straight-A
student who stabbed his teacher over a low grade. "People with high IQs," he
concluded, "can be stunningly poor pilots of their personal lives." More
critical to success, he suggested, are the skills of self-awareness, empathy
and sociability associated with another, "emotional" kind of intelligence. After a decade of watching Bill Gates and other members of the high-tech
clique exact a real-life revenge of the nerds, and following the
consternation caused by "The Bell Curve," which claimed that IQ permanently
fixed our social station, America was primed for a philosophy centered on
something other than our analytic intelligence. Soon after its release,
"Emotional Intelligence" began climbing the bestseller lists, where it
reigned for months. ("Working With Emotional Intelligence," a follow-up book
published three years later, also sold robustly.) Yet if the book touched a sensitive chord among readers, answering some
deeply felt anxiety about their intellectual abilities, Goleman was no
anti-intellectual pundit arguing that the bookish have nothing to teach us. In fact, his was a pro-thinker's fable. A Harvard Ph.D. and science
writer for the New York Times, Goleman staked the claims of his work on academic research. In the wake of the book's success, his reputation as a true booster of scholarly learning only grew. While pop psychology tracts on emotion could provide only "well-intentioned advice based at best on clinical opinion but lacking
much, if any, scientific basis," he wrote, "science is finally able to
speak with authority to these urgent and perplexing questions of the psyche
at its most irrational, to map with some precision the human heart." Was this simply a PR move aimed at distinguishing his product from
the competition? Or had Goleman in fact discovered an intellectual
diamond in the rough that simply needed his polished prose to
make it popular? | ||
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