Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals … this number comes up time and time again.
    (Levitin 2006)
    You want to have a chance of turning an innate talent into genius – practice for three hours a day, twenty hours a week for ten years. So that’s nature, nurture and now a number.
    There is, according to Ericsson, one other factor at play here. ‘Practice doesn’t make perfect’, as they say. ‘Perfect practice makes perfect’. And what separates one from the other? You do. According to Ericsson, the formula for genius is ‘1 per cent inspiration, 70 per cent perspiration and 29 per cent good instruction’.
    But very few people are in the position where simply being very good at something puts bread on the table. Unless they are a baker. We are sociable creatures who, like ants, bees and celebrities, need others in order to live. Your IQ may contribute to who you are; your EQ (Emotional Quotient) will determine how far you go.
    If there are any teachers out there who haven’t yet read Daniel Goleman’s (1995) paradigm-shifting, first book
Emotional Intelligence
then put this one down and go and get it. (Or, in the spirit of this book, don’t put this one down, just log onto Amazon and order it. Or go onto iTunes and download it. It can be playing to you in just a few minutes. Or plug your Kindle in and download it. Or go onto YouTube. Or go to www.ted.com/talks/daniel_goleman_on_compassion.html and watch him talking at a TED conference. Anyway, you get the idea … .)
    The basic premise is, in a nutshell, your ‘softer skills’ such as dealing with yourself and others at an emotional level, are far more valid in today’s world than IQ alone. There has been a phrase doing the rounds in the world of business for a while which is the ‘death of competition’. Although the economic crisis nearly pushed companies – and countries – backwards again towards pulling up the figurative drawbridges on collaboration, most seem to have hung onto the fact that we will achieve more by working together. Certainly, in my own company we don’t ‘do’ competition. All the people who work under the Independent Thinking umbrella are, or could be, direct competitors of mine personally, but it makes far more sense to work together. (With some healthy internal market forces at play to keep everyone moving forward and improving their game. It’s not a communist collective!) Better this way, than all of us ploughing our own lonely furrows. We share ideas, we give ideas away, we meet as a whole group once a year up in the hills somewhere, we share platforms, we do ‘tag’ presentations, we are a collection of unconnected individuals who actually work together very well, as if shifting molecular state from gas to water to solid depending on what’s needed. In their powerful book
Funky Business
(1999), the world’s best-known bald Scandinavian business professors, Jonas Ridderstråle and Kjell Nordström describe the nature of teams in the new world of business. Rather than locking people into working together for long periods of time until an employee is fired, made redundant, leaves or dies, they suggest organizations will work more like Hollywood production companies where the very best team will come together for however long it takes to make a particular film and then disband with a different, but equally good, unit coalescing around a new project a few weeks or months later.
    These ways of working demand a level of sociability, personal motivation and self-confidence that working with the same team year in year out doesnot. In other words, regardless of how good a technician you may be in your chosen field, there are certain demands on you where success is down to your EQ. You would have to be very,
very
good to succeed and be a complete plonker when it comes to working together quickly and effectively as a team.
    In a 2006
Fortune
article entitled ‘Teamwork is an Individual Skill’ the magazine suggests that, ‘Becoming skilled at doing more with others may be the single most important thing you can do.’ 8 Are you teaching, then, this most important of skills – the ability to work well in a team? And it
is
a skill and as such
can
be taught. The article quotes Stanford sociologist Elizabeth Cohen who explains that if children are simply told to get themselves into teams then one child will often dominate. However, if the teacher