Howard Gardner, an American developmental psychologist and Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, proposed the theory of multiple intelligences in 1983 in a book called Frames of Mind. The theory challenges the idea that intelligence can be estimated using a single measure such as IQ.
According to Gardner, each type of intelligence represents a different way of processing information. This is significant because if people process information in different ways then multiple strategies will be required to communicate effectively. This is relevant not only for teachers but also for management consultants, marketers, and any other professional who communicates for a living.
Gardner’s Eight Intelligences
According to Gardner, there are eight types of intelligence:
- Verbal-linguistic – the ability to analyse information and produce work that involves spoken and written language.
- Logical-mathematical – the ability to use logic and mathematics to solve abstract problems.
- Visual-spatial – the ability to comprehend maps and other types of graphical information.
- Musical – the ability to produce and make meaning of different types of sound.
- Naturalistic – the ability to identify and distinguish among different types of plants, animals, and weather formations found in the natural world.
- Bodily-kinesthetic – the ability to use one’s own body to create products or solve problems.
- Interpersonal – the ability to recognize and understand other people’s moods, desires, motivations, and intentions.
- Intrapersonal – the ability to recognize and assess ones own moods, desires, motivations, and intentions.
Implications for Consulting Recruitment
Unlike other professions, like engineering or accounting, there is not a single type of degree that management consulting firms look for. Some consultants have commerce degrees and MBAs but many do not.
The most obvious reason for this broad based hiring strategy is that consulting firms like McKinsey are looking for people with personal impact, entrepreneurial drive, leadership, and problem solving ability rather than specific technical training. It doesn’t matter what you have done, so long as you have excelled and can show that you have the right qualities.
The other less obvious benefit of a broad based hiring strategy is that it draws people from diverse backgrounds: an Olympic athlete, a violinist with the National Symphony Orchestra, a PhD in environmental studies. If people have different types of intelligence, as Gardner has proposed, then bringing together a diverse group of high achievers may be exactly the winning formula needed to solve the most challenging problems that clients face.
Implications for Consulting Engagements
Consultants are famous for using PowerPoint slides to communicate their analysis and recommendations at the end of a project engagement.
Serious minded people, like lawyers, often marvel that consultants get paid so much when their slides contain more pretty graphs and pictures than technical details. However, the consultants know what they are doing.
The purpose of using PowerPoint slides is not to prove that the consultants are worthy of the client’s time (this is taken as a given) but rather to communicate the key takeaway lessons from the project as clearly and effectively as possible.
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