Biography

Goleman was born in Stockton, California, and his intellectual foundation is a PhD from Harvard, where he also taught. His speciality is psychology and brain sciences, a subject he wrote about for 12 years for the New York Times.

His career took off with the publication of his international best-seller Emotional Intelligence (1995), which was followed three years later by another successful book Working With Emotional Intelligence.

Goleman develops ideas which others began, and amalgamates them into a usable whole. He postulates that Binet's IQ is capable of measuring only a part of the make-up regarding people's intelligence, and that it fails to record the softer inter-personal skills and the perceptive intellectualism of creative people and those with the ability to interact with others – ie, the skill you would expect in salespeople.

Although IQ tests provide statistical assessment, the case for EI is that it will result in more open forms of management, and enhance the performance of HR by providing an understanding of skills that have been more difficult to define.

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