Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The author of more than 20 books, translated into 29 languages, and several hundred articles, Gardner is best known in educational circles for his theory of Multiple Intelligences. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Education, and the London-based Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. He was twice selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of the 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. In May 2008, he was ranked the fifth-most influential business thinker by The Wall Street Journal.

Liu: In Leading Minds, you take a cognitive approach to leadership. From a cognitive view, how do you define leadership?

Gardner: Traditionally, leadership has been studied by political scientists and historians. When psychologists first began to study leadership, it was primarily psychoanalysis, studying what kinds of people have the personality to become a leader, and why they become a leader, what needs does it fulfill for the leader and for the audience. They also studied leadership in terms of social psychology: how people persuade others, about attitudes, beliefs, motivations, and so on.

Liu: In Leading Minds, you define a leader as “an individual who significantly affects the thoughts, feelings and/or behaviors of a significant number of individuals.”

Gardner: It’s partly because all of us are part of general intellectual currents which are powerful around the university. But my focus is different. Kotter is not particularly from psychology. Heifetz comes much more from psychoanalysis and personality psychology. So they would not be so interested in what I call mental representation; namely, the way somebody actually hears things, transforms things, and so on.

Liu: In your view, a leader changes other people’s minds through telling stories. But it seems to me that you define “story” broadly.

Gardner: You are correct. I define it very broadly. Stories are a very interesting phenomenon. That is why people all tell stories. Are you married?

Liu: Yes.

Gardner: When you come home and your wife says: “How was the trip?” and you say, “First I went here. Then I went there.” She is not going to pay attention. If you say, “When I got to the airport, I suddenly discovered that I had left all my important documents behind,” that would get her attention.

Liu: That’s narrative. That’s the major form of a story. But you also write in Leading Minds that the phrases of a sonata and the gestures of a dance are also stories.

Gardner: Let me first go back to narratives. The way I define it, a narrative isn’t just one thing after another. Rather, there is some kind of a problem, or obstacle, or puzzle which gets people’s interest. Then the story involves how the protagonist deals with that particular problem and the tragedy if they fail. But, you know, in life we’d like to have a better ending than average.

Liu: So you still refer to narratives as stories.

Gardner: Yes. I think it’s basically linguistic or something which can be thought of in linguistic terms. In the 1940s, a social psychologist did a very famous experiment. It involved an animated cartoon in which some rectangles, triangles, and circles were moving around. Any ordinary person who looked at that cartoon immediately said, “Oh, it’s a boy chasing a girl there.” But people who suffer from autism could not see that movie the way ordinary people do. What I am saying here is that you can make a piece of music or a film more like a narrative, but much of music or film doesn’t have narratives.

Liu: Actually in Leading Minds, you said a story includes narratives, invented accounts, overt or propositional accounts, and visions of life. So it seems to me that everything is a story. You also said that Einstein was a leader. His story was not narratives, but ideas of physics.

Gardner: Yes. That’s how I got into the idea of leadership. I was not particularly thinking about leadership, which was not a classic problem in cognitive psychology. I was trying to understand creativity. I wrote a book called Creating Minds, in which Gandhi was the one most like a leader. I tried to understand what people like Einstein did. I realized they worked with different kinds of symbols: musical symbols, mathematical symbols, and literary symbols. These were very powerful. They did two things: they affected people whom were in contact with them and they changed the way people worked with symbols in the future. After Picasso broke down representational art, people began to open artistic windows and doors which had been closed before.

Liu: People like Albert Einstein and Margaret Mead are often referred to as thought leaders. You call them indirect leaders. Are they the same thing?

Gardner: Margaret Mead, a cultural anthropologist, is interesting because more than most of the other indirect leaders, she became a public personality because she happened to be good at it and liked it. To answer your question, yes, I think indirect leaders would be similar except I think most people when they talk about thought leaders will not include artists or inventors. I don’t know where the phrase “thought leaders” comes from but we have a phrase now which does apply to me: “public intellectuals.” These are people who are basically teachers and writers but who write for something like The New York Times, not just for a journal that only specialists read. But a public intellectual is not exactly the same thing as a thought leader. You can be a thought leader whether or not anybody knows what you look like. But for public intellectuals, they know what you look like.

Liu: In Leading Minds, you said there are three broad categories of stories: stories about the self, stories about the group, and stories about values and meaning.

Gardner: I don’t remember that; I wrote the book about 15 years ago. But I believe you!

Liu: Really? That is interesting because this idea has influenced another leadership thinker, Noel Tichy, a lot. He paraphrased that there are three kinds of leadership story: the “Who am I?” story, the “Who are we?” story, and the “Where are we going?” story. Would you agree with him?

Gardner: If you ask me, “Are they three great and important stories?” my answer is, “Yes, absolutely.” If you say, “Are they the only stories?” I would have to think about it.

Liu: When I first heard about the story of the self, I thought it was about the leader himself, in which he let his followers know about him and his values. But I later realized that what you are actually saying is that the leader tells a story that helps the followers identify or find themselves.

Gardner: Absolutely. At least in the contexts which I’m familiar with, the audience has to be able to identify with the story. So the more the story seems exotic, the less they can relate to it. This is one of Obama’s problems in running for president. His story is very interesting, but if you are very provincial, if you have never left Montana, the story of his life is not going to have much meaning for you.

Liu: So the story about the self is more about “yourself” than “myself.”

Gardner: Let’s put it this way. The story that one tells as a leader has to have a mirror in it so that the audience can identify with it. Bill Clinton is the most effective speaker I have ever heard. He could be in a room with thousands of people, and he would be aware of everyone in that room. When he says something that makes some people stiffen up, he picks it up immediately and adjusts his story so that people can feel connected again.

Liu: Let’s talk about leadership and multiple intelligences. In Leading Minds you highlighted the importance of linguistic intelligence and interpersonal intelligence to leadership. However, you didn’t emphasize the importance of intrapersonal intelligence. Many leadership thinkers stress that knowing who you are is very important for a leader. Is the capacity of knowing who you are the same as intrapersonal intelligence? Is it important for a leader?

Gardner: Intrapersonal intelligence and what I would call existential intelligence are certainly very important. I try to make the distinction—and I’m not sure how important it is—between people who analyze themselves and people who are comfortable with themselves. If to know yourself means to know how you are going to react to be effective in certain situations, then I think intrapersonal is very important.

Liu: David Gergen⁴ wrote something very interesting about Clinton. He said that Clinton is very clever, he knows what other people want, but he has never known what he wants.

Gardner: As I said in one of my books: Clinton is a great storyteller. He has wonderful stories. But he tells way too many, and it’s not clear which one he deeply believes in.

Liu: In the corporate world the theory of emotional intelligence is more popular than the idea of multiple intelligences. My understanding is that, in your framework, emotional intelligence is a combination of intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences. Do I understand this correctly?

Gardner: Emotional intelligence is basically about understanding yourself and understanding other people. Having intelligence is one thing, but how you use it is quite another. In some of my more recent work in collaboration with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, I’ve been looking at applying intelligence for a positive purpose. The Good Work project began in 1994 when the three of us, all psychologists, felt that American society was being undermined and transformed by the prevailing thinking that markets were the best way for running and regulating everything. People were saying government was bad, market was good. We became particularly interested in professions—law, medicine, and journalism—because they have had difficulty surviving as independent institutions with enduring value systems when everything was controlled by the bottom line.

Liu: Arthur Andersen?

Gardner: That’s right. Now, in 2008, we can see all the costs of unregulated markets. The costs are mostly in the United States and in poor countries, but they are going to have an effect everywhere.

Liu: By good work, I think you refer to work that is excellent, engaging, and ethical. Is that right?

Gardner: That’s right, and I would love for these ideas to become better known in China. The reason I think it’s important in China is that you have a Confucian tradition, which is thousands of years old, Marxism, which is hundreds of years old (although your Marxism is a kind of Soviet imitation, so it’s 80 years old) and then you have the Chinese view of capitalism and markets that started in the 1980s. In combination, they don’t work very well, and you end up living in a vacuum, which is not conducive to encouraging excellence, engagement, and ethics and which enables events such as the poisoned-milk episode to occur. When you have an ethical society, people don’t poison milk, not simply because they are afraid of what’s going to happen to them but also because they are thinking of their ethical responsibilities as a worker or a manager.

Liu: I know your research has covered a broad range of areas, but I have a question specifically about leadership and good work. Intuitively I think a leader’s job in an organization is to create and motivate good work. Would you agree?

Gardner: Sure. And the best way to motivate is to embody it yourself and select people who you don’t have to train a lot to be that way. Of course it’s much easier said than done. You find several people who were glorified in business books in the 1990s are now in jail. So it’s much easier to talk the ethics game than to embody it and select people who have ethical DNA. Then the hardest part is to say, “You are great in some ways. But this place is not right for you because you don’t get it.”

Liu: I am thinking about the metaphor of the fox and the hedgehog which you also used in your book. It seems to me that you first tell a “story” of multiple intelligences and then you apply it everywhere.

Gardner: Or others do.

Liu: I am also thinking about your recent idea of the five minds for the future, which includes the disciplined mind and the synthesizing mind. Can I say that you became a hedgehog first and then a fox? Or to be effective, profound thinkers should be a hedgehog first and then a fox? And a hedgehog has a disciplined mind and a fox, a synthesizing mind, in your framework?

Gardner: As an academic, I have been struck by how many of my colleagues become interested in something and then they literally study it for 40 years. Within 10 years, they know more than anybody. Sometimes there is 30 years more work to do; and sometimes they just repeat themselves.

Liu: In your recent book, you are turning from description to prescription. You are saying that people should have five minds to be successful in the future.

Gardner: If we are involved in institutions, whether in education or business, these are the skills which we want to cultivate. The last two—respectful mind and ethical mind—have to apply to everyone. The first three—disciplined, synthesizing, and creative minds—are all very important. But like the distinction between the hedgehog and fox, some people are going to be terrific at doing what they do, at their fundamental discipline, but not particularly good at synthesizing.

Liu: So the five minds are more at the organizational level.

Gardner: I think everyone who goes to school ought to be exposed to some manifestations of all five minds. But people would sort themselves out just like hedgehogs and foxes would sort themselves out. I would never be content to be the very best disciplinarian. I am more of a synthesizer. We should help people sort themselves out. It’s as wrong to take a highly disciplined engineer from MIT and say “You are to be an entrepreneur” as it is to make somebody who is very broad spend 15 years micro-managing one specific thing. It doesn’t work.