Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day

Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss. Harper Business, $32.99 (288p) ISBN 978-0-06327976-6

Science journalist Goleman (Altered Traits) teams up with Cherniss (Beyond Burnout), a psychology professor emeritus at Rutgers University, to deliver a mostly successful treatise on the benefits of emotional intelligence (EI) in the workplace. They suggest EI is characterized by selfunderstanding, the ability to “keep disturbing emotions from disrupting” one’s activity, and empathy, which helps individuals support coworkers and be good team players. Research illustrates the advantages of

EI, as when the authors describe a study that found the most productive teams at an unnamed “large manufacturing plant” were distinguished by the “sense of psychological safety” members established through regular check-ins about each other’s needs. Such studies make a persuasive case for EI’s importance in the office, but, as Goleman and Cherniss concede, there are “far too few actual experiments on how to design” EI training. The EI programs that do exist, they note, explain the tenets of EI and offer such exercises as asking participants to “track moments you become emotionally hijacked,” reflect on what caused the reaction, and think about “what would be a more effective response.” Though the advice isn’t always actionable, this is still a thought-provoking study of what it takes to succeed in business. Agent: Max Brockman, Brockman Inc. (Jan.) of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Picking apart the artistic failures of each tale, Pugh suggests that the “Tale of Melibee” is “mind-numbingly boring,” consisting largely of didactic moralizing from a wife convincing her husband not to take revenge on his enemies. According to Pugh, several of the tales suffer from inelegant genre hybridizations, such as the “Knight’s Tale,” which he faults for saddling a chivalric romance with unsuccessful attempts to incorporate the conventions of epic poetry, including a “tedious” list of 21 tree species intended to mimic epics’ use of “catalogs as a mnemonic device.” Other tales bungle their message, Pugh posits, writing that the “proto-feminist” sentiments found in the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” which mocks the “cultural presumption that men’s phallic authority is tied to their penises,” are undermined by the Wife of Bath’s tale itself, in which a knight who rapes a young woman largely escapes punishment. Pugh’s willingness to kick Chaucer off his pedestal is a refreshing departure from staid scholarship on the poet, but it’s clear that Pugh’s criticisms stem from a deep love for his subject, warts and all. The result is an unusually lively take on the medieval classic. (Jan.)