Skip to main content

The Emotionally Intelligent Manager

Being emotionally intelligent is easy except if it's hard. That's why we have books to teach us such things. To be truthful, I picked up this book just to see what the "Four Key Emotional Skills of Leadership" are. Here goes:
1. Identifying how all of the key participants feel, themselves included
2. Using these feelings to guide the thinking and reasoning of the people involved
3. Understanding how feelings might change and develop as events unfold
4. Managing to stay open to the data of feelings and integrating them into decisions and actions.
Jossey-Bass has a sample chapter on their website. Anyway, this is the model put forward by David R. Caruso and Peter Salovey. So, in the past--what would you say?--five years or so, emotional intelligence has been all the rage. Basically, though, it boils down to "don't be a jerk." Know what I mean? But we have all kinds of jerkiness left over from the days when the foreman ruled the masses at the factory, and from the days when women were clawing their way to the top. So now, "emotional intelligence" is in so that we can all just get along. Reminds me of Aristotle's Rhetoric and appeals to pathos and connection with one's audience.

ISBN# 0787970719
By David R. Caruso and Peter Salovey

Popular posts from this blog

We've Always Done it That Way: 101 Things About Associations We Must Change

From what I can tell, the impetus for this book was that the folks who wrote it, Jeff De Cagna , David Gammel , Jamie Notter , Mickie Rops and Amy Smith , were “concerned by the instinctively conservative approach to organizational stewardship that far too many association executives and volunteers continue to pursue in the early years of the 21 st century.” I took notes throughout the book, and now I realize they are far too extensive to make a very good book review. And I am definitely the choir that this book is preaching to. However, I really, really liked the problems these folks addressed and they pretty much slaughtered and butchered several sacred cows. This book is not extensive narrative or heavily footnoted, but it is based on the collective experience of 5 people who together have worked with many different organizations, and the collective themes will be familiar to anyone in the field. On a meta level, this book takes observations of what’s happening in the
Read more

Public sector information design

Here's an article from the UK's Design Council talking about how information design is important in public-sector efforts. Of course, it's helpful to everyone, but this is a good example of the universal need for better presentation of information--and more design.
Read more

An Army of Davids

So, I've been spending some time with Glenn Reynold's book (Glenn being of course the seminal and highly influential Instapundit ), and I must say that it gives me lots of language I can use to talk about phenomena that are easily observable right now. I think you could say that Glenn Reynolds has done for technology what Virginia Postrel did with design topics . Which is to say, they beat the drum and say, hey, look at what this democratization of knowledge can do for you! In that vein, the book is really pretty visionary, pointing out the magic of the internet age. And I for one see it as magical. You know how Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pa in Little Town on the Prairie said to Laura that it was an amazing time to be alive (that was in the 1890s)? I've been actively thinking that to myself for the past few years, and An Army of Davids gives me ample evidence to back that up with its talk of citizen empowerment and the "comfy chair revolution." The theme of "
Read more