HALF-WITS IN THE BOARDROOM -- Carly Fiorina & Hewlett-Packard Board!

HALF-.WITS IN THE BOARDROOM -- Carly Fiorina & Hewlett-Packard Board!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2006

The Greek word “chaos” means literally “gap,” a breaching of the imagined perspective with the real; the failure of the intuitive mind to make union with the cognitive mind. It is perhaps the chief reason boardrooms across the globe are male dominated with half-wits who refuse to use their feminine minds. Now, women as CEOs are emulating these half-wits to our eternal loss.

Author Daniel Goleman did quite a service to closing the gap between thinking and feeling when he came out with his book “Emotional Intelligence.” For far too long, the false notion reigned supreme that IQ or intellectual intelligence was the end all of the problem solving.

You only have to look at the chaos of the world to see the evidence that such intelligence has been inadequate to meet the challenges of the times. Half-wits or masculine brains, alone, have proven insufficient to bring balance back from the breach.

Goleman, sad to say, has hit the wall with his newest book “Social Intelligence,” mainly because his paradigm suggests there is a distinct feminine and masculine social intelligence, as if we have a bifurcated mind. Sex role identities are learned behavior not genetic. There is no feminine or masculine social intelligence other than what is programmed into the individual. By writing as if it is a reified fact compounds the dilemma and deception. This leads Goleman to claim women are better at reading emotions, and men tend to be better at managing them during crisis. He would have been more accurate if he had said the “right brain” is better at reading emotions and the “left brain” is better at managing data.

Men and women possess the same bicameral mind with a brain divided into a right and left lobe. The left lobe is considered the seat of logic and the right lobe the seat of intuition. Likewise, these two respective brains are commonly referred to as the masculine (left brain) and feminine (right brain).

Perhaps men are better at managing crisis because the crises they manage are the crises they have created; women are better at reading emotions because they have been kept off stage while men flaunt their folly on stage.

Women, Goleman continues, are better at reading social interaction, but tend to ruminate more when things go wrong. He means women keep their tongues while men blunder into some kind of action because the male brain says it is better to act than not when you have no idea what to do. Men are the bulls in the China closet while women sweep up the pieces.

I share all this with you because the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina, who was fired, is now promoting her book of vindication with a most masculine title “Tough Choices.”

I have not read the book, but I have seen the well coiffure lady on Charlie Rose on PBS, and have read several articles written about her and her book. Her spiteful posture is decidedly masculine which is unfortunate.

One of the constant themes of her self-promotion is that the big boys in the boardroom did not accept her as one of them. While claiming, “I am a professional woman.”

Man or woman, in the end, it is what have you done for me lately that rules the day. Gender has no claim unless we make gender the issue. It would seem that Ms. Fiorina had a gender crunch in which she attempted to imitate, emulate, duplicate, replicate, and reify what she thought was the expected masculine bravado and decisiveness required of her role. When ego is on display self-demands rule rather than the job, which is role demands.

If ego-speak rules, then accomplishments will be reeled off such as cost cutting, systems integration, function consolidation, and profit producing strategies that turned, in this case, HP around. Women know that people make the difference; half-wits of the boardroom think they do. When a woman sounds like a man, they have won.

Leading, that’s the job, no need to flaunt it. Flaunting sounds too much like the half-wit male brain speaking that cannot join the breach with the feminine brain; too much like a woman trying to act like a man, who takes male pride in being a half-wit.

In point of fact, men have acted as self-important half-wits for centuries now with their linear logic and cognitive rationale, their game theory, and quantitative objectivity. Such half-wits have no time for intuition, abstraction, pluralism, contradiction, on plodding frameworks. They are thinkers and doers; not feelers and wonderers; analyst, not integrators.

“Give me the facts,” male speak says, “I’m a value free planner.” Men pride themselves in a concrete orientation, not a conceptual framework; they are progressive, not regressive. And the name for this male speak is “chaos.”

While men have had the smugness of using only one-half of their brain, they obligingly will the other half to the domain of women. I hear male speak when Ms. Fiorina argues about her decisiveness, making no mention of how much her conceptual, intuitive and feeling sensitivity had to do with her climb to fame and fortune.

She may be totally wrong about why she was let go. It might not be because she was a woman but because she acted too much like the other half-wits on the board. Their strategy is “ready, fire, aim!” To consent to this male speak made her a half-wit of another kind, something I find perplexing, but also somewhat understandable.

It is a strange thing when we act as half-wits, as if we are all this or all that. We are not all loving or all hating but both. We are not all docile or aggressive but both. We are not sensitive or insensitive but both. It is the marriage of these two sides that gives us vitality, perspective and joins the breach to eliminate the chaos. Insight comes from the clash of these two lobes of the brain coming together as a marriage of one.

What I hear is the harangue of a Paris Hilton type celebrity aiming to get back at the half-wits of the boardroom. I hear this when she describes going to a business meeting when she was at AT&T, dressed conservatively, and being mistaken as one of the new acts of the club. The woman protests too much.

Her claim that a glass ceiling doesn’t exist for women, but a glass trapdoor is a shallow and empty charge.

Leadership will change when women are not afraid to be women in business and men who are not afraid to use their feminine brain to close the breach of chaos. Daniel Goleman’s social intelligence paradigm is not only a little too much, but misleading. He should have stuck to “Emotional Intelligence” which is the intelligence that is least understood and most abused.

Carly Fiorina male speak does not serve her well. “When I finally reached the top after striving my entire career to be judged by results and accomplishments, the coverage of my gender, my appearance and the perceptions of my personality would vastly outweigh anything else,” suggests she had forgotten the rule that had served her so well as a secretary, from which she rose to the top.

Every secretary knows this rule: lead by listening, move immovable objects by whispering wisdom into the ear of the monster, and let the monster take credit, as your influence rules.

I never had a secretary that wasn’t smarter than I was; never had a secretary that wasn’t wiser than I was, and never had a secretary that had to roll her shoulders and lead with her chin, as I did, to get things done.

Carly Fiorina thought that as she entered a “man’s world” she should leave this wise counsel behind, and assume the Teflon man that are the half-wits of every boardroom. It is for that decision that Hewlett-Packard, and other stockholders such as myself, continues to suffer. I wish her well as she invites that secretary in her soul back in her future endeavors.

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This was another essay composed yesterday during my daily peripatetic walk.