is one of the world's most recognized experts on topics

relating to emotion intelligence.

He is also an amazing author.

He has written more than ten books, and his book \"Emotional

Intelligence,\" that one book alone,

sold more than 5 million copies.

He has received many awards, and he

has been nominated twice for the Pulitzer prize.

On a personal level, Dan is also the person most responsible

for me becoming an author.

So back in 2007, Dan and I, with a bunch

of distinguished friends, co-created something

called \"Search Inside Yourself,\" which is

became a very popular curriculum in Google and beyond.

And I remember in 2009, Dan and I

were taking a walk right there.

I remember the exact place and exact time.

We were taking a walk where I was

trying to convince him to write a book on \"Search

Inside Yourself.\"

And what he told me was, he said, I'd love to do it.

I just don't have the time.

And then he looked at me, he pointed his finger at me,

and said, Meng, why don't you write the book?

I was like, me?

I'm an engineer, not a doctor.

Dammit, Jim.

Eventually, because of Dan's support and his confidence

in me, I did end up writing a book.

So thank you so much, Danny.

I'm really excited about Dan's new book,

\"Focus-- the Hidden Driver of Excellence.\"

Skillfulness over attention is the foundation

of all higher cognitive and emotional abilities.

Attention creates the conditions for personal excellence.

Attention is so important that in \"Search Inside Yourself,\"

it is the first thing we train.

The first thing we train is attention.

Yet I think the subject of attention

itself is not getting enough attention, ironically.

And I cannot think of anybody better to write a book

on an important topic as Dan.

So my dear friends-- my dear friend, Danny,

I'm delighted that you wrote this book.

And I'm delighted that you didn't

ask me to write the book.

My friends, please welcome my friend,

and Google's friend, Dan Goleman.

DANIEL GOLEMAN: Thank you.

That's sweet.

I'm always happy to come to Google.

2007, that reminded me of something.

In 2007, there was a short squib in \"Time\" magazine.

And it said, there's a new word in the English language.

The word is \"pizzled.\"

It's a combination of \"puzzled\" and \"pissed off.\"

And it describes how you feel when the person you're with

takes out their BlackBerry and starts talking to someone else.

Think about that.

Both things have died.

That word and BlackBerry too.

Things change quickly.

That says something.

I remember when I went around to publishers and said,

I'd like to write a book about attention.

One of them said, that's great.

Keep it short.

Because I think attention is a capacity-- a vital capacity,

as Meng was hinting-- that's really under siege today.

I'm most worried about our kids, actually,

but I think we all are kind of victims.

Here's something rather provocative.

Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize winner,

said, \"What information consumes is

the attention of its recipients.

Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty

of attention\"-- to the extent that you understand

that there are two kinds of attention.

There's the attention that we voluntarily direct,

and there's the attention that seduces us.

There are actually different systems in the brain.

One is a top down system from the prefrontal area.

This is when we decide to concentrate on our work.

We're applying that kind of attention.

But then there are the little seduction--

the endless seductions.

And there are more and more and more of them.

I get-- I'm writing away on my book and I get a little pop-up,

you've got an email.

That's a seduction.

That's an intrusion in sustained focus.

And because of the excellence of our technology

and the cleverness of people who design technology--

some of whom are right in this room,

I just realized-- our attention needs

to be paid more attention to if we're going to maintain or even

increase our capacity for it.

This also-- the fact that attention is threatened,

along with the fact that there-- in the last two or three years,

there's been an explosion of neuroscience findings

about the attentional circuitry, which

has vast implications for us.

This has really, since I'm a science journalist,

enticed me to write the book that Meng refused to write,

perhaps luckily, now that I think about it.

And as I got into it, I realized I

had to rethink emotional intelligence.

You didn't mention that \"Harvard Business Review\" art--

yeah, the next issue of \"Harvard Business Review,\" which

will be out next week, has a cover article by me

on the leader's focus, the kind of focus,

intentional capacities, that anyone who's a leader needs.

And we're actually all leaders.

I think of leaders as anyone with a sphere of influence--

not people on the chart, necessarily.

But to the extent that we all need

to get more control over our attention,

and it makes us good at the things that

matter in performance these days,

it's led me to revise emotional intelligence,

or my thinking about it.

And I'll share that with you.

There's an effect called-- in statistics, many of you

are probably familiar with it-- the floor effect.

It occurs at a place like Google.

It occurs at an Ivy League college.

It occurs anywhere, for example, that there's

a premium put for admission on IQ.

And it's an interesting phenomenon,

because it's rather paradoxical.

What it means is that IQ, which is a fantastic predictor

of the level of cognitive complexity that you can manage,

and that you can understand-- and therefore sorts

people into job roles and so on-- abilities.

Once you get selected for IQ, then excellence

becomes defined largely by things other than IQ.

And it's because of the floor effect.

And are you all familiar with the floor effect?

OK.

So a little statistic-- so if you were to plot, say--

how's this going to be?-- IQ and emotional intelligence

into a scatter plot, you get a fairly random distribution,

because those are largely independent aspects of ability,

and they partake of different parts of the brain, largely.

So you have this pool of people.

And if this is the IQ axis, and you select the 99th percentile,

and this is the emotional intelligence access,

there's much less range of variation for IQ

than there is for emotional intelligence.

And the way this manifests in the organizational world more

generally is that if you look at what's called

a competence model-- does anyone know

what a competence model is?

Another term I should explain.

So when I was a graduate student,

my professor at Harvard, David McClellan, wrote an article.

It was very controversial.

He said, if you want to hire the best

person for a job, any job in any organization,

don't look at their IQ.

Don't look at their GPA.

Don't look at their personality profile.

Look at people in your own organization who

hold the role you're hiring for.

Identify the top 10% by whatever metric makes

sense for that job, compare them systematically

to people who are only average in that role,

and determine the competencies or ability

set that you find in the stars that you

don't find in the average.

That's now called competence modeling.

And it's done by world class organizations,

pretty much worldwide.

And what's interesting about competence model-- at least

what interests me-- is if you aggregate many different models

and they're all independently derived-- they're proprietary,

actually, because a company or organization wants

to know for competitive reasons, what

should we look for in our hires?

What should we promote for?

What should we develop in people?

And they want to hold that closely.

But I aggregated 100 or 200 models

after I wrote \"Emotional Intelligence,\" the follow-up

book.

And I only looked at two dimensions

in the competence models.

One was, if you look at the distinguishing competencies--

not the entry level competencies,

but distinguishing, the ones that mark the stars--

and you separate them in terms of purely cognitive abilities,

like IQ or technical skills, and on the other side of the ledger

you have emotional intelligence--

which is how we manage ourselves and how

we manage our relationships-- it turns out

that for leadership, about 80% to 90%

of the competencies independently identified

are on the emotional intelligence side.

Well, that makes sense, because leadership is not

about being the smartest person in the room.

It's about helping other people be as smart as they can,

which is a people skill.

And so emotional intelligence has four parts-- self

awareness, self management, empathy, and social skill.

And when I looked at that through the lens of attention,

I realized that the first and third components, self

awareness and empathy, are varieties of attention.

And social skill, actually, is a combination

of how we manage ourselves and what

we read in the other person.

So managing ourselves turns out to be

based on how aware we are of ourselves.

So I revised the model.

I'll walk you through some of that in looking at-- well,

I'm going to share with you this article that is coming out

next week in the \"Harvard Business Review,\"

so you don't have to buy it because you got

the \"Reader's Digest\" version already.

So the first ability, or set of abilities-- inner focus,

I call it, which is being aware of what's going on inside you.

And that's exactly what you're teaching, Meng,

in \"Search Inside Yourself.\"

You're teaching self-awareness.

And by the way, I see every variety of meditation,

including mindfulness, as a retraining of attention.

If you strip away the belief system

of any meditation from any tradition in the world,

you find an attentional mechanism

is being strengthened.

Would you do agree with that?

Yeah?

Yeah, exactly.

So for self-awareness, self-awareness

is really important in many rather surprising areas

of life, I think.

I have a friend-- I grew up in the Central

Valley of California, in the horrible midwest of California.

Don't stop there.

Just keep going to Lake Tahoe, really.

And there was a guy who lived down

the road in the next town who I got to know pretty well.

He was a really bad student.

He almost flunked out of high school.

He managed to go to a community college, found

his way to a film course.

He loved film.

So he got into a film school.

He did pretty well-- did a student film that

caught the attention of a director, got

hired by the director.

The director liked his work so much

that he let him direct a film.