IABC Café

I’ll be gender-neutral in the body of this post, but the quote referenced in my heading, attributed to U.S. baseball coaching legend Leo Durocher, is too well-known to alter for the sake of political correctness.

Leo’s opinion, however, that “Nice Guys Finish Last,” may not be accurate–if a book by Wharton School Publishing is correct. The book, “Moral Intelligence: Enhancing Business Performance & Leadership Success,” by Doug Lennick and Fred Kiel, examines the connection between strong moral principles and business success. According to the authors, the connection is strong between “nice (moral) people” and business success.

Read the book’s first chapter, which is available at the link above. I liked the discussion regarding the relatively greater competitive advantage that you can get with higher “moral intelligence” and “emotional intelligence” compared to “cognitive intelligence” (IQ).

In this post-Enron world, where trust and engagement go hand-in-hand, this concept seems particularly timely and accurate.

Thanks go to Mike Zimet of Dialogue Solutions for passing along the link, and for pointing out some of the article points that he found interesting, including:

Moral intelligence is not just important to effective leadership; it is the “central intelligence” for all humans. Why? It’s because moral intelligence directs our other forms of intelligence to do something worthwhile. Moral intelligence gives our life purpose. Without moral intelligence, we would be able to do things and experience events, but they would lack meaning.

Without moral intelligence, we wouldn’t know why we do what we do — or even what difference our existence makes in the great cosmic scheme of things.

If IABC didn’t care about this topic, we wouldn’t have a Code of Ethics.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 22nd, 2005 at 1:31 pm and is filed under General, IABC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.