OtherWise

13Second That Emotion

Businesspeople of both sexes are decidedly ambivalent about emotion in the workplace. At best, it is awkward and better be over quickly. At worse, it is a pollutant clouding the cold, data-driven reasoning that business supposedly runs on.

But for at least two decades, an alternative view has been struggling to take hold in corporate America. Its popularity has waxed and waned with the economic cycles, perhaps reaching a low point during the Great Recession. Still, a 1998 Harvard Business Review article on “emotional intelligence” ranks as the magazine’s bestselling reprint of all time, even though the editors studiously avoided the term in the title. There are psychologists and sociologists who find the whole concept hopelessly ...