By Howard Gardner
Harvard Business School Press, $24.9
“The empires of the future will be the empires of the mind,” Winston Churchill once said. Perhaps it is not surprising to see Howard Gardner quoting him approvingly. Professor Gardner holds the chair in cognition and education at the Harvard graduate school of education and has been a prominent analyst of the human mind for 20 years.
His 1983 publication, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, started a debate on human intelligence that continues to this day. Gardner argued that, rather than looking at intelligence as a single quality or capacity, we need to consider eight or nine kinds of intelligence that, in his view, people are capable of displaying. Psychologists and educationalists have been having a jolly good row about that one ever since.
This new book's “five minds” should not be confused with Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. The latest work looks at the intellectual approaches managers and employees will need to function successfully in the 21st century.
Gardner identifies these five different minds as: disciplined, synthesising, creating, respectful and ethical. The disciplined mind “has mastered at least one way of thinking”, Gardner says. “Without at least one discipline...the individual is destined to march to someone else's tune.”
The synthesising mind “takes information from disparate sources...and puts it together in ways that make sense to the synthesiser and also other persons...the capacity to synthesise becomes ever more crucial as information continues to mount at dizzying rates”.
The creating mind “breaks new ground”, the author says. “It puts forth new ideas, poses unfamiliar questions, conjures up fresh ways of thinking, arrives at unexpected answers.” In so doing, the creating mind “seeks to remain at least one step ahead” of computers.
The respectful mind “notes and welcomes differences between human individuals and between human groups . . . In a world where we are all interlinked, intolerance or disrespect is no longer a viable option.”
Last, the ethical mind “conceptualises how workers can serve purposes beyond self-interest”. The ethical mind then “acts on the basis of these analyses”.
Gardner does not suggest he has summarised here the only qualities any of us need to prosper. But he makes a good claim for the importance of the five minds he has picked out. Success in the modern world requires a mastery of professional disciplines. Information overload, and subsequent helplessness, is the fate of those unable to synthesise complex data. Creativity sets us apart from intelligent machines that threaten to make less able humans redundant.
These statements have probably been more or less true for two centuries, but there is an intensity to the nature of the challenge today. More controversially, Gardner argues that people without respect “will not be worthy of respect by others and will poison the workplace”, while people without ethics “will yield a world devoid of decent workers and responsible citizens: none of us will want to live on that desolate planet”.
Sceptical readers may object to the at times arch tone adopted by the learned professor ? there is no mistaking this book's academic origins. Others will argue that businesses can carry on their work very happily without pausing to consider whether any one of Gardner's minds is being deployed at a given moment.
Yet the author has put his finger on some vital attributes needed by professionals in this hyper-competitive age. He has a clear view from his ivory tower.
Even more usefully, he warns us to be alert for colleagues who appear to display these essential skills, but are in fact simply faking it. Watch out, for example, for those who claim mastery of a subject on the basis of inadequate experience, pseudo-synthesisers who merely lump haphazard material together, “creatives” whose ideas are neither sound nor original, “respecters” who merely tolerate others from a standpoint of ignorance, and “ethical champions” whose personal standards fall far short of the values they trumpet.
It is “good work” that Gardner ultimately wants to promote, even if he is uneasy about the prospects of achieving it. These are tough times for all, even if you possess a fine mind ? or minds: “It is difficult to be respectful toward others when an ‘argument mentality' characterises politics and mass media...it is difficult to behave ethically when so many rewards ? monetary and renown ? are showered on those who spurn ethics but have not, or at least have not yet, been held accountable by the broader society.” |
