Shantanu's Blog

Emotional Intelligence scores over IQ in managerial skills

Claus Moller

Times of India
Feb 15, 2000
By Hema Gobindram- Lobo
Over a 100 corporate managers took a day off last weekend, their cell phones switched off, to attend a seminar at the Taj on “Emotional Intelligence” by Claus Moller, designated as one of the eigtht ‘quality gurus’ by the British Department of Trade and Industry.
In the Seminar Moller said that all these decades, companies have emphasized the importance of being technically and financially efficient, while trying to employ highly skilled, qualified and high flying managers with a high IQ. But, the time has come to realize the need to employ and retain emotionally competent people because problems arising out of the world of emotions are difficult to solve, but are critical to the welfare of the company, and could play a key role in deciding the success or failure of an organization or an individual.
The good news, Moller said, was that while IQ changes little after our teen years, IE continues to develop as we go through life and learn from our experiences.
It seems like a lot of hard work, to improve one’s personal or organizational efficiency, but it is simply a matter of ‘heart work’ Moller told the managers, in his typical gentle, but unmistakable firm tone, accompanied by a splendid sense of humor and a vivid graphic presentation. “This graph shows a lot of executives hanging up their cloaks outside in the cloak room, as well as their ‘hearts’ before entering their office, so we know that they have gone to work without a heart,” explained Moller. “And now when they return home after the day’s work, they pick up their cloaks, but not their ‘hearts’, so they go home ‘heartless’, possibly to sit board in front of the television and fall asleep, he added.
Speaking to Bombay Times, Moller stated that Indians were very emotional people. They did have a sense of humour, but expressed themselves differently, depending on whether they were at work, at home, in an official or casual environment. “There is a special workshop on how to be your own self,” said Moller, while “observing that several managers believed that ‘distancing’ themselves from their employees would get them best results, an exercise which may actually result in distancing from one’s own self.
When queried, One of the participants, Firdaus Jussawala, Commercial Manager, Air India, stated that “this exceptional seminar on ‘Emotional Intelligence’ is much needed to restore the balance and correct our lop-sided attitudes where emotional behavioral changes need to take precedence over brainy requirements, which we already have.”
Based in Denmark, Claus Moller’s Time Manager International, founded and chaired by him, trains over 200,000 people every year. Top organizations ranging from Japan Airlines to the European Union Commission, the Scandinavian Airlines System and the British Airways have implemented the concepts and ideas of Moller.

Moller’s formula for success
Reaching one’s goals requires the right combination of rational and emotional skills. Successfully intelligent people know their strengths and weaknesses. They capitalize on their strengths, overcome or compensate for their weaknesses and realize that no one is perfect.

Businessworld - May 28, 2001

Man of the Week
Clarence Chandran
Overcoming Odds
Some guys don’t know when to slow down. It appears Nortel Networks’ COO till last week, Clarence J. Chandran, 52 did not. The suave Banglorean, who has been in the news since he was elevated to the No. 2 spot last June, had been working overtime to take the 105 years old Canadian firm to the top of the rung. He had global responsibility for Nortel’s Net and enterprise customers including sales, marketing, R&D and customer care. He was also responsible for the integration of acquisitions, apart from HR and information systems organizations. With so much on his plate it was understandable that even a murderous assault was not allowed to keep him from his work for too long.
In June 1997 Chandran was stabbed repeatedly by three burglars while sleeping in a friend’s house in Singapore. It was a grievous attack that called for a four hour operation and many days in the ICU before he was declared out of danger. But the healing was slow and he was forced to undergo fresh surgery owing to complications. That was to be expected, given Chandran’s tough schedule as the guy in the hot seat at Nortel, a global Net and communications leader with revenues of $30.3 billion last year. But now mounting pressure on Nortel, whose stock has slumped and is not expected to meet its slashed growth target of 15% this year, has forced Chandran, 52, to call it a day after spending 28 years at Nortel.
Starting out as a salesman with Bell Canada, Chandran has worked his way up the ladder the hard way. It also sharpened his business acumen and gave him the grit to push through tough acquisitions. Inspired by management guru Peter Drucker, Chandran’s motto is: “Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.” The Net remains Chandran’s great mission. “Let’s imagine for a minute that you have a million people with cable modems – a not too outlandish thought – a million people that have one megabit DSL and 100,000 people who have access to Ethernet in their hotel rooms. If you shake up this cocktail mix and you project, say, to the year 2003 to 2004, you’d find that you have a billion Net users, probably a billion wireline users, and several hundred million wireless users, with some of these double counted.” Even if the Nortel stint has ended, Chandran is bound to bounce back. As he said in a recent interview: “The great thing is never to give up.” That may have come from his fondness for fishing. Like all good fishermen he knows you need infinite patience to get the big bite. With stock options worth $39.5 million at the last count, Chandran can wait – for quite a while.

Always Learning What joy to awake every morning in a world so filled with things to learn.
--H. M. Kriz (1994)