Emotional Intelligence was a paragraph-length concept expressed in a library of publications. At the time it was a shock in the system. Do you really mean emotions count in hard management and leadership? Wow! The Emotional Intelligence industry (that created subsequent sequels in the form of social intelligence, even spiritual intelligence) has continued to warn about the need for ‘broader intelligences’, in plural. And there is a place for this! But what really needs a book is Emotional Ignorance. Or two books, or… errr. Day after day we see people in high places oblivious to what is going on in the human side of the enterprise: too complex, too soft (soft and hard are still used as terms) too distracting. The worst is not the ignorant though. They are the ones who think they have a high Emotional score but behave as blind men in the land of people dynamics. It’s this Ignorance that worries me: robotic management, robotic processes, robotic systems managed by people who want … innovation, entrepreneurship and risk taking.
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