In 2007, we chose a book called Responsibility at Work as the winner of the Personal Development category for that year’s Business Book of the Year Awards. It was the first time I’d been exposed to Howard Gardner’s work–he is prolific*, so the book we featured was only a small part of his overall catalog–, and I became quite interested in his Theory of Multiple Intelligences. I don’t recall if I’ve ever taken an official IQ test but I can tell you I wouldn’t have done well on it. I’m one of those people with test anxiety which impairs my ability to perform well on tests. It’s a bit like an athlete who doesn’t compete well, I suppose. Some athletes are able to turn anxiousness into energy while others get distracted by it. That’s how I am in any kind of test that needs a right or wrong answer: is it any wonder why I oriented toward the fine arts and Blue Book tests that I could fill out to my heart’s content? So naturally I am drawn to other ways of measuring intelligence. Not only for my own ego, but because most people know full well that human performance is complicated despite our desire to place people in pigeon-holes.

Wikipedia, as always, sums the theory up handily for us, describing the Theory of Multiple Intelligences as “a model of intelligence that differentiates intelligence into various specific (primarily sensory) modalities, rather than seeing it as dominated by a single general ability.” Gardner proposed the following as meeting his criteria for what is an intelligence.

• Spatial
• Linguistic
• Logical-mathematical
• Bodily-kinesthetic
• Musical
• Interpersonal
• Intrapersonal
• Naturalistic

Not everyone agrees with Gardner on this list, or even sees a point to the exercise, but Gardner acknowledges that this is truly just a theory, a theory that over time will prove true and/or valuable.

“I’ve put forth a candidate set of intelligences that are said to have their own characteristic processes and to be reasonably independent of one another. Over time, the particular intelligences nominated, and their degree of dependence or independence of one another, will be more firmly established.” HowardGardner.com/FAQ

There are two new books out this month that posit, if indirectly, additions to the above list of intelligences.

Ethical Intelligence: Five Principles for Untangling Your Toughest Problems at Work and Beyond by Bruce Weinstein, aka “The Ethics Guy” on Bloomberg’s Businessweek Online.

Many of us are familiar with Daniel Goleman’s popular book, Emotional Intelligence which focused on “the ability to discern how others are feeling, which can be quite different from the ways they present themselves to the world.” Here Bruce Weinstein draws a distinction between emotional intelligence and ethical intelligence, saying that it is not only important to process the world and its varied situations emotionally, but, then, when you actually have to do something in response, that requires ethical intelligence. “Emotional intelligence alone won’t–and can’t–tell you what you ought to do. That’s because emotional intelligence is a psychological mattter, but the question “What’s the right thing to do?” is an ethical one.

Weinstein’s five principles of ethical intelligence are:

• Do No Harm
• Make Things Better
• Respect Others
• Be Fair
• Be Loving

And this new book will show you how to identify and improve your Ethical Intelligence and “imbue your life with meaning and enrich all of your relationships” by doing the right thing.

Intuitive Compass: Why the Best Decisions Balance Reason and Instinct by Francis Cholle, an international business consultant with a hefty and diverse vitae, including study in theater and clinical psychology.

In The Intuitive Compass, Cholle introduces us to Intuitive Intelligence, and defends our use of it vigorously. “Intuitive Intelligence is a set of skills I designed that uses intuition to get to the instinctual and nonconscious parts of our minds. It can be learned and developed, but because instinct does not operate in the same way as reason, Intuitive Intelligence requires unusual forms of learning and thinking.” The benefit of understanding instinct is then that we are able to alter our decision-making process to find balance and reason.

Cholle begins his book with an Intuitive Compass to help you determine how you make decisions, and then, surprisingly, he leads us into the field of play. There is a lot of good material that extends past play in this book, including how intuition allows agility and creativity, how intuition enables innovation, how you can use your intuitive intelligence; but one of my favorite lines is: “Play open us up to the possibility that we don’t need more of anything–time, money, knowledge, and so on–in order to produce more. It is a radical idea, especially in business, where we often hear the argument that budgets are limited and therefore the ability to innovate is limited.”

In the case of both books, as well as Gardner’s work, the compelling aspect is that the more information we learn about the way we think, the better we get at doing the right thing.

*Perhaps Gardner’s top business book is Five Minds for the Future. And for information about his GoodWork Project, visit www.goodworkproject.org.

Teachers in the Milwaukee Public School system were surprised on their first day back in the classroom this fall with a gift from a local company, Penzey’s Spices. The gift included a jar of their newest salt-free seasoning, Forward! (which not-incidentally is Wisconsin’s state motto), and a jar of their all-purpose cinnamon. And, since my husband is a teacher, we were he was lucky enough to be a recipient. The gift box was created and given, as owner Bill Penzey explains in a note in their fall catalog, to send support to teachers who do a valuable if sometimes under-appreciated job.

If you are a subscriber of Penzey’s monthly magazine or even get their seasonal spice catalog, you’ll know that Penzey’s has a very specific point of view. Owner Bill Penzey explains the teacher gift box in a catalog letter, saying:

Penzey’s Forward! is dedicated to those in our past whose effort and kindness opened for us a world of opportunity. Forward! suggests we repay this debt to our past by honestly supporting those whose efforts keep the door to the world of opportunity open for those who come after us. In this way we move Forward. This is what teaching is all about, and it is also what cooking is all about.

Nothing provocative in that, but then he adds,

To add to their load the blame for our post-credit-swap economy when their work does more to build our economy than anyone else’s is no recipe for a productive school year.

You only have to do a quick Google search to know that not everyone wants their spices to come with a dash of political and/or cultural opinion. But that same Google search will show ample support of Penzey’s action and certainly strengthens the affiliation many of us already feel for the brand. It is refreshing to find a company like Penzey’s that does not prevaricate. They aim to be exactly who they are—who their founder was—and they don’t hesitate to advocate that position, yet still produce a product that is highly regarded and has found success nationally.

Seth Godin addresses this quality on his blog today in a post explicating Merging/Emerging.

Emerging is when you use a platform to come into your own. Merging is when you sacrifice who you are to become part of something else.

Merging is what the system wants from you. To give up your dreams and your identity to further the goals of the system. Managers push for employees to merge into the organization.

Emerging is what a platform and support and leadership allow you to do. Emerging is what we need from you.

Penzey’s has not sacrificed who they are to become part of something else (to paraphrase Seth) and continues to emerge as a good and giving business.

***

Blake Mycoskie started TOMS Shoes pretty much out of the blue while on vacation in Argentina in 2006. He was already a busy businessman, an entrepreneur with seriously diverse interests. But on vacation, a product and a problem presented itself, and he couldn’t ignore serendipity. Mycoskie recognized that relying on donors to fund the shoe drives he was witnessing in Argentina was plumbing a well that would at some point dry up. But, if he could create a product (simple, comfy shoes also inspired by the locals of that country) that people would love, and a story that people could fall in love with, the funds needed to help children who need help the most just might keep rolling in and more and more children could get assistance. So he decided that for each pair of TOMS shoes he sold, TOMS would send a pair of shoes to a child who has none, and by 2010 he and his team had put a million pairs of shoes on the feet of kids who most needed them. When TOMS started selling sunglasses, TOMS tied it to a program that provides children in need of eye care and eye wear.

So what did you think would happen when Blake Mycoskie released his first book? That’s right, if you buy a copy of Mycoskie’s new book, Start Something That Matters, Random House will give a book to a child through FirstBook.org.

Mycoskie’s tale shares yet another example of a company created to produce an excellent product that also stays true to its founder’s beliefs, and encourages others to not only consume, but to provide. In Start Something That Matters, Mycoskie’s story will bring tears to your eyes as he relays his emotions upon bringing the first pairs of shoes to children. But he will also show you that his personal values match the basic tenets of his company, such as his instruction to “Keep It Simple” in regards to both your business model and your personal life, where he advocates cleaning out your closets four times a year (though I think he’d probably hope you keep those TOMS Shoes in there). Mycoskie also introduces us to other giving companies such as method and donorschoose.org that make giving and social profit an imperative.

Of course, what stories like Penzey’s Spices and TOMS Shoes make clear is that businesses do not have to sacrifice their social values for success, and that we don’t have to either.

When you booted up Windows 95, a man named Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno made that experience more remarkable and memorable. He made the little league game at the end of the movie Traffic seem profound and timeless—a gentle, reassuring reminder that the universe is stitched together of individual, seemingly mundane moments. His music makes one think and write things like that, takes you to different dimensions and other worlds. Just writing this post caused me to stumble across a YouTube video that is nothing but the Windows 95 Startup Sound for 10 Minutes, and not only did I listen to it, but I took the brilliant advice of the only intelligent comment I’ve ever come across on YouTube and played it in multiple tabs at once. The result was 10 minutes of bliss. Window 95 slowed down 23 times is also lovely (and if you happen you watch the equally slowed down Microsoft commercial that accompanies it, pause it at minute 2:12).

I write of Brian Eno today because he has showed up in two books that have floated across my desk recently. Both books—Culture, edited by John Brockman, and The Innovator’s Cookbook edited by Steven Johnson—are compilations of material that include interviews with Eno. You may know the editors… Steven Johnson from his wonderful 2010 book, Where Good Ideas Come From, and John Brockman from his many compilations, including This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future, My Einstein and The Mind—the last of which was released alongside Culture earlier this month. Brockman is also the author of The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution.

In Culture, Eno observes that art “seems to to be something we are biologically inclined to do,” that “all human groups engage in something that we call artistic behavior” and talks about the need to develop a language for having a conversation about the arts. He compares the transition he’s looking for to the way Darwin changed the field of natural history forever by giving it a common language—taking it from a science that simply collected material to one that could develop theories about the material collected. He goes on to discuss his own theory that we codify most of our knowledge in metaphors, and that “Science … enables us to come up with a structure upon which we can build useful metaphors.: He continues: “This is why artists are interested in science … because science keeps coming up with big ideas, like chaos, like complexity, that we then think, ah , yes, perhaps that’s how a lot of things work. Then we have a new metaphor.” Speaking of the spectrum, or continuum, our minds move along, he says:

If I drew [a] spectrum of the highly rational to the highly intuitive, what I would have to say is that we don’t spend much of our time at either of those extremes. We spend most of our time somewhere along the middle.

You have art writers who constantly celebrate the “intuition” extreme and think that this is the sort of apex of human existence, and you have scientists who by default, almost, dignify the other one. That’s where they live, or that’s where they’d like to live. They want to be able to make the kind of statements that push that boundary. What I would like to see is a conversation that admits that we spend most of our time somewhere in the middle, and we ought to find a way of thinking about it.

I suppose at the root of all this is the feeling that possibly the only way that humans can remain cooperative is by those of us who are artists or who are interested in the arts realizing that we have some kind of a job to do. It’s no good anymore, as far as I’m concerned, for artists to just take the bohemian attitude of, oh, it just comes out of me, and I don’t know what I’m doing, etc. I just can’t stand that; I don’t want this romantic attitude that says artists shouldn’t be a part of this planet. This is a real job, and it has to do something.

In Steven Johnson’s The Innovator’s Cookbook, coming out in October from Riverhead Books, he discusses how technologies spark innovation, not the other way around:

I think one thing that is interesting that I don’t think people acknowledge is that normally we think that technologies arise out of good ideas. So somebody has a brilliant scientific notion or artistic notion and then they create the technology to realize it. But actually I more and more think that it’s the technology that precedes the understanding of the principles. This is what happens in science a lot: a tool is invented, and the tool then leads to some new realization, something that you could now do or see or understand that you could never have understood before. I think that often happens in the arts. Think for instance of my favorite example—because it’s the one I’ve spent my life working in—the recording studio. The multitrack studio was invented for completely mundane reasons so that engineers could could more easily balance the voice against the rest of the performers. They didn’t have to make all those decisions before the recording; they could do it afterward. But of course, that humble invention gave rise to a whole different way of making music, really a different understanding of music completely.

Beyond Eno, Brockman’s book contains Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus), Jaron Lanier (You Are Not a Gadget) and Douglass Rushkoff (author of Get Back in the Box: How Being Great at What You Do Is Great for Business, Life, Inc. and Program and Be Programmed) among many others. Johnson pulls from the minds of Clayton Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma), Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class), Tom Kelley (The Art of Innovation) and more. The two books also share Stewart Brand (author of Whole Earth Discipline among other books) as a contributor. Taken together, they make for a really interesting read about culture, innovation, the culture of innovation, and the innovation of culture. I highly recommend both books—and Brian Eno.