cover image Practical Intelligence: Working Smarter in Business and Everyday Life

Practical Intelligence: Working Smarter in Business and Everyday Life

Roger Peters. HarperCollins Publishers, $17.95 (341pp) ISBN 978-0-06-015681-7

The ability to deal with all kinds of professional and personal situations depends, in the view of Peters, a clinical psychologist at Fort Lewis College in Colorado, on a combination of skills, intuition, cognitive styles, judgment and knowledge that he includes under the heading of practical intelligence (P.I.)qualified as ""work smarts'' as opposed to academic, knowledge-based ``school smarts.'' Using case studies from business, teaching, law, medicine and everyday activities such as driving and child rearing, the author sets out, sometimes in psychological jargon, to help readers exploit aptitudes and strengthen the weakest elements of their P.I. This advice is intended to help develop motor skills, spatial perception, and verbal and logical intelligence. He also stresses that learning to deal with individuals is essential to the growth of group leadership qualities. Basic to all such development is our ``intrapersonal intelligence,'' or knowledge and understanding of self. (June)