Guru Interview: Howard Gardner

Guru Interview:
Howard Gardner
Harvard Professor, psychologist and
educator Howard Gardner talks to
Emerald Management First about his
new book Five Minds for the Future.
Interview by Alistair Craven
Emerald for Managers | © Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Howard Gardner is the John H. and
Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of
Cognition and Education at the Harvard
Graduate School of Education. He also
holds positions as Adjunct Professor of
Psychology at Harvard University and
Senior Director of Harvard Project Zero.
Among numerous honours, Gardner received
a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981. In 1990,
he was the first American to receive the
University of Louisville’s Grawemeyer Award
in Education and in 2000 he received a
Fellowship from the John S. Guggenheim
Memorial Foundation. He has received
honorary degrees from 21 colleges and
universities, including institutions in Ireland,
Italy and Israel. In 2004 he was named an
Honorary Professor at East China Normal
University in Shanghai. In 2005 he was
selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect
magazines as one of 100 most influential
public intellectuals in the world.
The author of over 20 books translated into
24 languages, and several hundred articles,
Gardner is best known in educational circles
for his theory of multiple intelligences, a
critique of the notion that there exists but a
single human intelligence that can be
assessed by standard psychometric
instruments. During the past two decades, he
and colleagues at Project Zero have been
working on the design of performance-based
assessments; education for understanding;
the use of multiple intelligences to achieve
more personalized curriculum, instruction,
and assessment; and the nature of
interdisciplinary efforts in education.
Gardner’s latest book is entitled Five Minds
for the Future. World-renowned for his theory
of multiple intelligences, Gardner takes that
thinking to the next level in this book,
drawing from a wealth of diverse examples to
illuminate his ideas.
Concise and engaging, Five Minds for the
Future aims to inspire lifelong learning in any
reader as well as provide valuable insights
for those charged with training and
developing organizational leaders – both
today and tomorrow.
Guru Interview | Management & Leadership 1

Your formal discipline is psychology, and you
state that it took you a decade to “think like a
psychologist.” What do you mean by this?
Howard Gardner:
When I hear any kind of empirical claim about
human beings, I almost automatically think “how
could one test this?” So, if someone says “you
know, women speak more fluently than men,
everyone knows that, I say to myself “oh , yea,
what’s your measure, how could I convince you
that you were wrong – or convince myself that I
was wrong.” My wife is a research psychologist
as well, and while we often disagree about
substantive claims, we typically arrive at similar
ways of testing those claims. That way of
thinking takes many months to develop and
several years to become intuitive and almost
automatic.
You have many years of experience in
management and have “the lessons and battle
scars to show for it.” Can you share a couple with
us?
Howard Gardner:
As an observer, I have seen excellent deans and
presidents at Harvard, as well as ones who
showed how NOT to manage or lead. I have
written about this and have tried to learn from the
errors as well as the positive examples. As the
long time head of a research group (essentially
for 35 years, 28 with official responsibility), I
made almost all the mistakes that one could
make, and hope that I’ve learned not to repeat
them. To mention just two:
• I used to try to hire people who were
like me. Now I realize that is precisely
the wrong thing to do. I should hire
people who have complementary skills,
who can teach me and I can teach them.
• I used to try to be friends with those
whom I hire. It is great to get along with
your employees and to enjoy their
company. But as manager leader, my
job is to get the job done, to be
respected for what I stand for and how I
proceed, and to help my associates
develop. It is not to be liked; if I am
liked, that is a bonus.
In the book you claim that current formal
education still prepares students primarily for
the world of the past rather than for possible
worlds of the future. Why do you hold this
belief? What can be done about the situation?
Howard Gardner:
Emerald for Managers | © Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Education changes very slowly and that is not all
bad. But it is anachronistic when the world is
changing very quickly. To compound problems,
people tend to teach what they were taught and
the way that they were taught; and rarely are
there rewards for keeping up, and revising
methods and content appropriately – especially
not at the pre-collegiate level. Political entities
that are small, future oriented, and run in a
somewhat autocratic way are the most successful
at shifting course – that is why Singapore leads
in so many respects. But on the other hand, while
I admire Singapore, I would not want to live there
myself. In the US, while we have some excellent
public and independent schools, most educators
lead lives of quiet desperation and cannot expect
to act as an avant garde, let alone a reflective
one. In the countries that are most effective
educationally, like Finland and Japan (which
differ in so many other respects), teachers are
respected.
What is the crossover between your theory of
interdisciplinary syntheses and cross-functional
collaboration that we hear so much about in
today’s workplace?
Howard Gardner:
I am sure that these concepts are related – mine
comes more out of psychology/epistemology, the
latter comes from business/organizational
management literature. It is not enough for
different groups/sectors/teams to work together
or seek to be synergistic.
“Creativity is inevitably
unpredictable and unruly.
Unless the leadership /
management realizes this,
gives members a good deal of
slack, and, most importantly,
respects the efforts and does
not unduly penalize those some
of whose ideas go nowhere,
you won’t really have a
creativity-fostering
atmosphere.”
My term and analysis emphasizes that
individuals with different expertises have
fundamentally different ways of thinking. If they
are to work together, they must begin by
respecting those other ways of thinking, and
Guru Interview | Management & Leadership 2

trying, as much as possible, to fathom them and
ultimately to internalize them. That’s the meaning
of the passage quoted from John Seely Brown in
the book.
You mention in the book that in the past,
knowledge accumulated far more gradually. From
your experiences, are today’s managers really
suffering from the so-called “information
overload” syndrome?
Howard Gardner:
I know of no one who is immune these days from
information overload. Perhaps it was always
there but now it is more salient than ever. People
work 80 or 90 hours a week and cant keep up
with the deluge of information that is important
for them to execute their work properly. The only
solution is to develop ways to triage, to organize,
to reorganize, to make use of the insights of
others, and vice versa. That is what I mean when I
say that the synthesizing mind will be the most
valuable mind in our time and moving forward –
at least until it is all done by some machine.
You highlight an interesting dilemma with
regard to organizational creativity. Although
many organizations, as you put it, “…proclaim
themselves as cradles of creativity”, they also
signal that too much originality is “taboo.” Can
you elucidate?
Howard Gardner:
Nowadays there are countless buzzphrases.
Show me a university that does not say that it is
training leaders. Show me a corporation that
does not say that it wants all employees to
contribute to consequential decision making.
But the proof is in the doing. As explained in the
next question, creativity is inevitably
unpredictable and unruly. Unless the
leadership/management realizes this, gives
members a good deal of slack, and, most
importantly, respects the efforts and does not
unduly penalize those some of whose ideas go
nowhere, you won’t really have a creativityfostering
atmosphere. Companies like 3M and
Google seem to stand out in this regard because
the leaders themselves are creators and they
build time and support for creation into the daily
DNA of the organization – not just in annual
reports to stockholders or statements to the
business press.
You highlight Enron as a stark example of
pseudo creativity and argue that “undisciplined
creativity is creativity undermined.” What steps
can organizations take to bring a disciplined
approach to creativity and idea management?
Howard Gardner:
Emerald for Managers | © Emerald Group Publishing Limited
By its nature, creativity is an unruly process; you
can’t and should not stop the mind from thinking
anything that it wants. But at a certain point, one
has to bring judgment, discrimination, the ‘blue
pencil’ of editing to bear. That is where Enron fell
short. No one said “that may sound like a great
idea, but here are the four reasons why we
should NEVER go in that direction.” The more
that both creation and critique are built into daily
operations, the more likely you will have an
organization that embodies both creativity and
discipline.
You talk at length about the ethical mind. Can
organizations truly pursue the dual ambitions of
maximizing profits and striving toward being a
socially responsible entity?
Howard Gardner:
As long you are concerned to increase profits
each quarter, the answer is definitely no. Only
those organizations that take the long view, make
it clear that they are doing so, and establish a
deserved reputation for reliability and integrity,
can ultimately be both profitable and
responsible. Johnson and Johnson has done
well over recent decades. I look to google.com as
a possible positive example in future years.
In summing up you alert us to the problem of
resistance. Do you think resistance to change
can ever be a positive force?
Howard Gardner:
Of course, I wish that there had been more
resistance to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong from
day one. Change in itself is neither good nor bad;
one has to consider the values that are
sustaining stasis or calling for change, who
espouses them, what are benefits and costs. And
as the list above testifies, you must do so before
it is too late. Eternal vigilance….
Can you tell us a little about Harvard’s Project
Zero of which you are Senior Director?
Howard Gardner:
HPZ began forty years ago and I was present at
the creation and co-directed it for 28 years. Our
original charge was to carry out basic empirical
and conceptual research on the arts and arts
education. Now, while maintaining a focus on the
arts, we look at human cognitive capacities
broadly, and think about how to nurture young
(and not so young) minds. I always say “at Project
Zero, we develop ideas about the mind and give
those ideas a push in the right direction.’ For
more, see:
http://pzweb.harvard.edu
Guru Interview | Management & Leadership 3

http://www.howardgardner.com
http://goodworkproject.org
Finally, what interests you outside of your
professional life, and why?
Howard Gardner:
My biggest involvement is my family – my wife,
four children, and first grand child, and my
mother, age 95 and still going strong. I love the
arts and listen always to music and attend as
many concerts, plays, and museum exhibitions
as I can, especially when travelling. Sometimes, I
play the piano, though not well any longer. I
serve on the board of the New York Museum of
Modern Art and like the mix of responsibilities
and experiences afforded by the position. □
Five Minds for the Future is published by Harvard
Business School Press and distributed by
McGraw-Hill in Europe:
http://www.mcgraw-hill.co.uk/harvard
Emerald for Managers | © Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Guru Interview | Management & Leadership 4