Leading in the wrong direction

September 1, 2007 Addition to this article

I am now in London. One of the major financial centers of the world. Yesterday I talked to a young MBA student from Pakistan. I told him that I have an MBA degree but have been divorced two times. At age 50 I am single. I have no partner, no children. I am financially independent, but very lonely. I have thought of killing myself. When I am depressed I can not hug my money. I would like to begin giving talks to university students who are studying business to share with them my life experiences and remind them that money can't buy you love. I want to explain my concept of emotional intelligence and show how it is very different than the corporate version promoted by so many of the business consultants.

I also told him that I now do voluntary work with suicidal teenagers. Sometimes these are the children of business executives. I know more about their lives than their parents do. This is fucked up and I want to help young people see how fucked up it is. I am sure that no business manager will feel good when he looks back on his life of hard work to realize he has no wife and his children have killed or cut themselves with razor blades, partly because of the pain of not feeling loved, accepted, understood and emotionally supported by their parents.

The psychologists and psychiatrists either don't know what is really going on, or they don't want to say it. But someone needs to start telling the truth.

S. Hein
September 1, 2007
London

Today I did a search for the term "emotionally intelligent soldier". I found that on all of Google, I am the only one who has ever put these words together in that order. Yet when I did a search on "emotionally intelligent manager" I found 519 and when I did "emotionally intelligent leader" I found 1,330. (see note)

Dan Goleman and the others who have been capitalizing on the term "emotional intelligence"
are leading us in the wrong direction.

They are not true leaders. They are not talking about the issues which most need to be talked about and which most concern humanity.

Dan Goleman's 1995 book brought the concept of emotional intelligence to the world. Since then Dan has led most of the world astray. One of the things that bothers me most about Goleman is what he did with his fame and influence after 1995: He used it to make more money for himself.

He did this by taking the term emotional intelligence into the corporate boardrooms around the world. Instead of really trying to help people -- to help them become better at managing emotions in the home, at meeting the emotional needs of children and teens -- he used his fame to help himself.

Dan wrote a little about something called "emotional literacy" in his 1995 book. Some say that he actually planned to title the book "Emotional literacy." But then he found the work of Jack Mayer and Peter Salovey and liked the term "emotional intelligence." My opinion has been and remains that Dan Goleman stole the term "emotional intelligence" from Jack and Peter. He has given them very little credit. And I suspect the credit he has given them in the past few years has largely been because of the pressure of my website. I have been the only one promoting any other definition or vision of emotional intelligence on the web besides Dan Goleman's.

I have called Dan Goleman's version of EI the "corporate definition of emotional intelligence." I just searched Google and I found I am the only one who has put these words together in such way as well. I found a reference to my article I wrote for HR.com back in July of 2001. (reference)

What this tells me again is that I myself need to be more of a leader in the so-called field of emotional intelligence.

Even David Caruso, a close friend of Jack Mayer's, has basically sold out to the corporate definition of EI, in my opinion. Well, saying "sold out" is a bit harsh. I don't think David did it for money. I think David got caught up in the flooding currents which Dan Goleman created.

Last year, David and Peter Salovey published a book called the Emotionally Intelligent Manager. They didn't write about emotional intelligence and children. They didn't write about emotional intelligence and teen suicide. They didn't write about emotional intelligence and preventing wars or terrorism. They wrote about emotional intelligence and management. They wrote it for the business world. In particular, the American business world.

The other day in my personal writing I wrote something like this: A leader has a vision and sets a course. A manager just gets people to follow in the leader's direction. He organizes the resources to accomplish this. He might motivate people, but he doesn't set the direction.

I would say that Dan Goleman is not a leader. He is a manager. He is using the idea of emotional intelligence to keep people moving along in the same direction, or very nearly the same direction, as they have been headed for years.

What I mean by this is that Dan Goleman has not really changed our thinking so radically as he and his PR people want us to believe. His values are not that different from mainstream America. And as I have said before and will say again, America is leading in the wrong direction.

I was born in the USA. I used to be proud to be from America. But lately I have felt embarrassed, ashamed to say I am from America. And I speak for millions of other Americans. I want to be proud once again to say, "I am from the USA." But before that can happen, America needs truly new leadership. Not more Dan Golemans.

I like David as a person. But we disagree substantially on some fundamental things. David has admitted to me he that he sometimes feels guilty that he might have taken Jack's concepts and not done justice to them. Well, David, I agree. I say it is time to take another look at what Jack was originally writing about. What you and Chuck Wolfe and Peter Salovey have done is not really helping the world much.

America is already great at managing. America has some of the best management tricks and techniques in the world. And America is great at marketing. The best, no doubt. But America lacks real leaders right now. George Bush is certainly not leading America or the world in a new direction. He is an embarrassment to the human species. We humans can do better than Dan Goleman and George Bush.

Much of the world looks up to the USA. But this is now more a result of habit than anything else. Yet the USA is losing respect fast around the world.

My website has criticized Dan Goleman very harshly. And I believe with good reason. In my little personal battle with Rob Emmerling I saw more clearly the problems with Goleman's idea of emotional intelligence.

They are not part of Dan Goleman's corporate definition of emotional intelligence. In all fairness, they are not really clearly stated as parts of Jack and Peter's model either, but I believe they would be more at home there.

The truth is that business managers right now don't really want people to be emotionally honest. Not unless it helps the bottom line. Not unless it helps them make more money. Nor do they really want people to be emotionally literate and talk about their feelings with feeling words.

If business people, customers and employees would talk about their real feelings, I suggest that nearly the whole American model of capitalism would fall apart.

Most business people are insecure. I say this because of one simple little thing. Their clothes. Their ties, and for women, their make up and jewelry.

If business people would talk about their real feelings, eventually they would have to admit they feel insecure and afraid. They are afraid of many things. Of getting fired, of losing their jobs, of competition, of looking stupid, of being exposed as frauds, of being accused of being bad parents and neglecting their kids while they are off making money.

Why do business people spend so much money on clothes and appearances? Does it really make them any more helpful to humanity? I say no it doesn't. I say in fact it makes them a harm to humanity. I say they are wasting resources on things like suits and ties and jewelry and high heel shoes and cosmetics. Not to mention expensive watches when they all have cell phones which show the time. Being in poor countries like Peru, Indonesia and South Africa have changed my priorities from when I was getting my MBA at the University of Texas at Austin.

I say that if business people were really questioned about why they spend all this money on appearances, they would eventually admit it is because of fear. Fear that if they don't "look successful" then they won't "be successful." But we come back to the very important question: How do we define success?

I would like to ask that question to Dan Goleman. But I doubt he would give me an answer. He is too afraid of my questions. He still has not answered a question I had for him two years ago. I asked how he would define an emotionally intelligent soldier.

He is afraid of my questions, afraid of the way I live. So is his webmaster, Rob Emmerling. They are desperate to shut me up. But even their latest efforts of trying to discredit me won't shut me up. Instead, it might just backfire. More people might now see how fake they really are. How shallow their values really are. How little the world needs people like them right now.

But I said I wanted to give you some facts. So let's go back to emotional literacy. I found out the other day that it is barely mentioned on the entire EI Consortium site. And then I looked for the term "emotional honesty" Not one result was found (reference1, reference 2)

My vision of emotional intelligence is much different than Dan Goleman's. I believe our emotions are designed to help us remember that our lives and our survival as a species are enhanced when we care about each other and help each other. Not when we make money from each other and spend it on clothes.

My idea of emotional intelligence is that there are some people who are born more emotionally intelligent. And these people can be identified and trained to help us solve the world's emotional problems. And I believe terrorism, for example, is an emotional problem. Not a military one.

I also believe teenagers are killing themselves and cutting themselves because their emotional needs are not being met. I believe an emotionally intelligent person, with the right training and education about the things that really matter, could show us how to prevent these teens from harming themselves and killing themselves. I believe we need to place a higher value on the feelings of children and teenagers. And that we are contaminating nature's intelligence system with our modern values. We are taking beautiful children and turning them into ugly adults.

But I believe this can be changed. I believe a more true understanding of what emotional intelligence really is, and could mean for humanity, could help us make desperately needed changes in the world.

So I am sorry to disappoint Dan Goleman and Rob Emmerling, but I am not going to shut up. I will keep trying to expose them and all the others who are merely in this for the money.

To find the July 2001 article, go to HR.com and do a search on emotional intelligence. As of April 19, 2005 this was the first article on the list. You must be a member to read the article on HR.com but you can also read a copy on my site.

I also noticed that when I did a search for "emotionally intelligent manager", number three on the list was this article by Keith Beasley. I felt encouraged to see this. You might recall Keith's name from reading about him on this site a while back in this posting in which I introduced him as the person who might actually have been the first to use the term "EQ" in a published article.

For years, Reuven Bar-On has been making the claim that he is the one who "coined" the term EQ, but I have found absolutely no evidence of this. Jack Mayer also searched and found only unsubstantiated claims by Reuven, nothing more. And Jack is a very diligent person.