Practical Intelligence: Working Smarter in Business and Everyday Life

A blueprint for managers who want to increase productivity, this guide, focusing on leadership skills, communications, logic, intuition, and creativity, explains how to develop and use practical intelligence in all phases of business and personal life

The ability to deal with all kinds of professional and personal situations depends, in the view of Peters, a clinical psychologist at Fort Lewis College in Colorado, on a combination of skills, intuition, cognitive styles, judgment and knowledge that he includes under the heading of practical intelligence (P.I.)qualified as "work smarts" as opposed to academic, knowledge-based "school smarts." Using case studies from business, teaching, law, medicine and everyday activities such as driving and child rearing, the author sets out, sometimes in psychological jargon, to help readers exploit aptitudes and strengthen the weakest elements of their P.I. This advice is intended to help develop motor skills, spatial perception, and verbal and logical intelligence. He also stresses that learning to deal with individuals is essential to the growth of group leadership qualities. Basic to all such development is our "intrapersonal intelligence," or knowledge and understanding of self.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Psychologist Peters examines the different kinds of "smarts" that successful people exhibit and finds that IQ ("school smarts") only partly accounts for that success. Practical intelligence, he says, is a combination of personal skills, physical and spatial intelligences, intuition, and creativity, in addition to academic abilities such as logical-mathematical intelligence, verbal skill, and critical thinking. Peters thinks even one's weakest abilities can be enhanced (a person with "no sense of direction" can improve spatial orientation skills, for example) and he suggests methods drawn fom a variety of fields. Recommended for general management psychology collections. Judith Eannarino, George Washington Univ. Lib., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.