Showing posts with label blink. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blink. Show all posts

Emotional Intelligence 2.0 Review

Emotional Intelligence 2.0
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Emotional Intelligence 2.0 ReviewI read the authors' first emotional intelligence book, and I think that 2.0 is a huge improvement. Here's a chapter by chapter look at why:
FOREWORD BY PATRICK LENCIONI
Lencioni is one of those gurus that has sold millions of books, none about emotional intelligence (EQ). As Lencioni proclaims in the foreword, he's no EQ expert, but he sees everyday how critical a skill it is to have and he's so enthusiastic about this book because it's the first he's read that actually shows you how to increase your EQ and apply it in your life.
THE JOURNEY
This chapter opens with a riveting story of a surfer who is attacked by a great white shark in California. I won't spoil it by telling you how, but the story is a great illustration of the power of emotion and how important it is to understand and manage our emotions. This chapter also illustrates how our brains are wired to react to events emotionally before our reason kicks in, and it lays the groundwork for the process by which the rest of the book will teach you to increase your EQ.
THE BIG PICTURE
This chapter teaches what EQ is and what it isn't. For example, a lot of people mistakenly think that EQ is a part of your personality. To the contrary EQ is separate from your personality, just as it is separate from your intellect, or IQ. It begins to build your understanding of emotions by showing what the five core emotions look like in varying degrees of intensity. Next the authors fun and engaging approach explains studies that illustrate how important EQ is in daily living. They show how your EQ impacts things like your tolerance for change, how you manage stress, even how much money you make!
-DIGGING IN: MY EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE ACTION PLAN-
If you haven't already, by this point in the book you need to open the orange envelope inside the back cover and retrieve the unique passcode that lets you go online to take the Emotional Intelligence Appraisal test. I'd actually heard of this test (it's the most widely used EQ test out there), so I thought it was pretty cool that they let you take it for free with the book. In addition to revealing your EQ scores, your test results guide you through the areas you need to work on improving the most. This chapter helps you to develop your plan of attack, including the action plan where you actually record what it is your going to do and by when.
-SELF-MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES-
(ACTUALLY THERE IS A CHAPTER OF STRATEGIES FOR EACH SKILL, BUT I'LL JUST DESCRIBE THIS ONE)
This section of the book has 66 strategies to increase your EQ. Each strategy is well-detailed (most 2-3 pages) and something that you can begin doing immediately. Your test results tell you which EQ skill you need to work on the most (for me it was Self-management), as well as which of the chapter's strategies will increase your ability in that skill the most. I thought this part was pretty cool. Basically, the test analyzed my score profile and picked the three strategies that would improve my biggest weaknesses in self-management. One of the strategies it suggested, Breathe Right, hit the nail on the head. I'm not one of these people that needs to take a deep breath to calm down and stop being angry, which is good because that's NOT what the strategy is teaching. Actually, it illustrates how some of us, when left to our own devices, breathe too shallow, which deprives some of the higher (rational) areas of the brain of the oxygen needed to keep us completely calm and focused. So now, whenever I need to clear my head, think on my feet at work, make a tough decision, figure out what I should get my wife for her birthday, etc. I use this breathing strategy, and I'm continually amazed by how quickly it makes me calm and focused. Anyway, that's just one self-management strategy, but I thought it'd be useful for you to see what one is like in detail.
-EPILOGUE--JUST THE FACTS: A LOOK AT THE LATEST DISCOVERIES IN EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE-
This epilogue is quite interesting. The authors' company is a think tank that has tested more than half a million people worldwide, and they share some of the more interesting conclusions from their data that didn't show up earlier in the book. For example, women outscore men in overall EQ, but the sexes have an equal ability in self-awareness (men fall short because they do less with the emotional information they take in). Anyhow, there are studies of EQ differences across various generations (Boomers vs. Millenials is really interesting), in different job titles (CEO's have the lowest EQ in the workforce!), and even US vs. China (our new, big economic competitor).
-DISCUSSION QUESTIONS FOR READING GROUPS-
This last appendix has some great questions for discussion. I'm not in a book club, but my wife read the book and we talked about some of these questions and it led to some really interesting discussions.Emotional Intelligence 2.0 Overview

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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Review

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking ReviewWell, as a huge fan of Gladwell's last book, The Tipping Point, I was excited last week to finally get my hands on his new effort: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. This time around Gladwell's basic thesis is that often snap judgements (what he calls "thin slicing") can be more accurate than well researched, careful analysis. Gladwell uses many examples (most are interesting) to demonstrate this behavior such as determining when art is faked, sizing up car buyers, picking presidential candidates and determining the characteristics of a person by observing their living space. This has always been Gladwell's talent: taking just-under-the-radar topics and bringing them into the public's view through great journalism and storytelling.
Gladwell is also careful to examine the flipside of this phenomenon: the times when "thin slicing" misleads us or gives us the wrong results. For instance, he presents examples where the mind works based on biases that don't necessarily enter the realm of conscious thought, but are nevertheless there (age, race, height, and so on).
It's a great topic and Gladwell sets it up with some wonderful examples, but then the book begins to have problems. First, the book is a little too anecdotal. Anyone who has ever had a 200-level psych class knows that what looks like cause and effect may be accounted for by an independent variable that wasn't considered (e.g., concluding cancer rates are higher in some area of the country because of pollution, when in fact the area has higher smoking rates as well). Given this, I found that too often conclusions are made on basic handwaving, or that important aspects of studies are not mentioned. For instance, Gladwell describes a study were observers are asked to determine certain characteristics (such as truthfulness, consciensciousness, etc.) of students by observing their dorm rooms; but, never does he mention how exactly one would determine these characteristics of individuals in a scientific manner for comparison. Such omissions leave the reader a little less than convinced.
Nevertheless, even with this flaw the first third of the book supports the thesis and makes for the usual entertaining reading; but things derail from there. The examples start to seem more peripheral: a rogue commander beating the conventional forces in a war game exercise, an artist known as Kenna who apparently should have made it big but didn't (why this example is interesting I've yet to figure out), and some rehash about coke vs pepsi from one of his older articles.
By the end of the book the whole thing derails into examples that just don't seem appropriate for the topic. Sure a study of why Pepsi always does better than Coke in blind tastes tests is interesting (and you can read his article on this without buying the book on Gladwell's web site), but does a study of "sips" vs "whole-can drinking" - people prefer sweet for sips (Pepsi) - really say something about unconscious rapid cognition?
One of Gladwell's greatest strengths is in recognizing interesting things, and then bringing them into conscious awareness so we actually realize these things are happening (whether it be tipping points or rapid cognition). I think he's partly achieved that in this book, but it doesn't come together the way the Tipping Point does. One gets the idea that this topic may have been better handled in an article rather than a full blown book.Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Overview

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