EI International / The Term and Its Problems

Why it became a product, and what that did to it

Broad promises sell better than narrow ones, and the market shaped the idea accordingly.

An idea becomes a product when someone can sell a bounded thing that supposedly delivers an unbounded benefit. Emotional intelligence fitted that shape almost perfectly. It sounded humane rather than technical, so it did not threaten anyone's sense of themselves as a person rather than a machine. It sounded improvable, so there was something to buy. And it sounded like a root cause, so any workplace problem could be attributed to a shortage of it. Once an idea can explain everything, the explanation costs nothing to produce, and the incentive shifts entirely towards distribution rather than accuracy.

The commercial framing changed the content, not just the packaging. Material sold to organisations has to promise organisational returns, so the claims drifted towards performance and leadership: that this capacity predicts who succeeds. Those claims are contested and, as usually stated, oversold. The evidence is far weaker than the confidence of the marketing, and the underlying quantities are far harder to pin down than a tidy chart suggests. We do not treat emotional intelligence as something that can be measured or scored, and we would suggest treating any confident number in this area as a sales artefact rather than a finding.

What was lost in the commercialisation is the ordinariness. The habits worth having are slow, boring and mostly invisible: pausing before replying to an irritating message, saying you are not sure what someone meant, noticing you are tired before you make a call. None of that fills a programme or justifies a fee. It is closer to housekeeping than to development. The honest version of this subject is unmarketable, which is one reason it is worth writing about somewhere that is not trying to sell you a transformation, and one reason the sceptical reader tends to end up better at it than the enthusiastic one.