 Emotions was early recognised as an important part of behaviour in organisations. Then little by little we come to realise how important emotions are right across the whole spectrum of decision-making. And surprisingly we know now that emotions not only can get in the way of rational decision-making, you can't make rational decisions without access to emotions. People who don't have access to their emotions, the doctors' box of this world, you find them in institutions, you don't find them out in running spaceships and in Star Trek, etc. If you don't have access to your emotions, you're incapable of making decisions regardless of what your intellectual intelligence is. And so we have a much clearer idea now that if you don't study the emotional dimensions you really don't have an appreciation of how organisational behaviour affects decision-making and behaviour in work in general. That's why it's so popular now. Well, the person who popularised emotional intelligence, his name was Daniel Goleman. Dan was the Social Sciences writer for the New York Times. He decides to do a work on a new technique he's heard about for teaching primary school in the New Hampshire area where he lives. And when he goes there, he discovers that the new technique is called emotional intelligence. He gets to know the people who basically promulgating the idea, Jack May and Peter Salaby. He becomes familiar with their work. And then based on that, he then writes emotional intelligence, why EQ matters more than IQ. The book becomes a bestseller. It appears on the cover of Time Magazine. You've certainly made it if you're on the cover of Time Magazine. Businesses can't get enough of it, especially as Goleman makes the claim in his book that researchers demonstrated that intellectual intelligence accounts for about 20% of your life's successes. It must be emotional intelligence that accounts for the other 80%. He makes a whole series of wild claims like that through the book. But through that sort of mechanism, the idea absolutely takes off in business and goes well beyond the scientific basis of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is defined by May and Salaby as an ability, it's an intelligence, an ability to recognize emotions, to incorporate the emotions in your thinking processes, to understand what the emotions are about and ultimately to manage emotions in yourself. The idea of emotional intelligence is perfectly valid. We've shown now quite conclusively through the research that's been done, the serious research that's been done on emotional intelligence, that it does make a difference. People who lack emotional intelligence constantly make errors in dealing with people and even in their judgmental decision making that can't be accounted for by the intellectual intelligence. So there's a lot of misinformation out there and unfortunately people continue to buy it even today. The message that I make is that emotional intelligence is valid but do take care that you're correct and usually the scientific version, not the popular versions. We're learning a lot now from the neurosciences. We can look into brains that were in ways that were just undreamt of just a few years ago. So functional magnetic resonance imaging, putting people in MRI machines and asking them to solve problems allows us to actually see what's going on inside their brains, which part of the emotions are being triggered. For instance, there's a guy at Harvard University, Joshua Green, who is studying ethical decision making and showing that the parts of the brain that are activated for ethical decision making are the same parts of the brain that are associated with our basic emotions. So we're learning all of this new information. There's little hats that you can put on that are electroencephalograph monitors and a group of researchers has got people in meetings, groups of people in meetings, literally looking into their brain while they're discussing and then synchronizing what they're saying with their brain waves that they're recording and learning basically what their inner thoughts are while they're expressing their outer thoughts. And this is really, really revolutionizing the study of emotions and already generating insights that we had no idea about just a few years ago. I still go into organizations, and my colleagues do, in our consulting roles. And we have senior managers telling us, you know, in our organization, we expect employees to leave their emotions at home. There can be as much emotion as they like outside the office. When they come into the office, we don't do emotions in this place. It's really important, not only that, I insist on it. I absolutely insist. You get what I'm talking about? That's a little bit of a message in that one. Look, the simple fact is emotions are there and people who are trying to be unemotional, get emotional about it. There's a simple little episode that I tell my students. The most irrational thought a human being can have is to think that other humans are rational. We need to just convince managers and consultants that you can't really advise people on the assumption that people are rational. It's just a recipe for disaster. If you try to cancel out the emotional side, you'll simply get incorrect decision-making. People are not accessing their emotions, and people do access their emotions. But if they're told not to access their emotions and to make their decisions in a cold, calculated way, it's going to lead them into bad decision-making. The novel laureate, Daniel Kahneman, wrote a book called Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, where he talks about in stock market decision-making, if you try to rely purely on the rational, computer-generated decisions, you will inevitably go down the gurgler. It's been demonstrated over and over again. Warren Buffett states it in the same terms. He says you can't make financial decisions without understanding the emotional underpinnings of that. And people who try to put the emotions on one side, they're not going to be effective. So one of the ways from a practical perspective that managers can approach this is by building an emotionally healthy organisation. It's an idea that's been with us for a while, but basically it's something that goes across all levels of the organisation, starts in the C-suite, but goes right down to the work-face. One of the secrets of that process, of course, is to look at the basics of emotional intelligence, get people to understand that they can accept their emotions, that they can recognise their emotions, what do emotions mean, and is it possible to manage emotions in yourself and in other people? Given the right circumstances, people can do that, but it first of all requires really an acceptance and acknowledgement that emotions are not to be swept under the carpet.