When Alexander (Sandy) Niningerwas twenty-three, and newly

commissioned as a lieutenant in theUnited States Army, he was sent to theSouth Pacific to serve with the 57th In-fantry of the Philippine Scouts. It wasJanuary, 1942. The Japanese had justseized Philippine ports at Vigan, Le-gazpi, Lamon Bay, and Lingayen, andforced the American and Philippineforces to retreat into Bataan, a ruggedpeninsula on the South China Sea.There,besieged and outnumbered, the Amer-icans set to work building a defensiveline, digging foxholes and constructingdikes and clearing underbrush to provideunobstructed sight lines for rifles andmachine guns. Nininger’s men were onthe line’s right flank. They labored dayand night.The heat and the mosquitoeswere nearly unbearable.

Quiet by nature, Nininger was talland slender, with wavy blond hair. AsFranklin M. Reck recounts in “Beyondthe Call of Duty,” Nininger had gradu-ated near the top of his class at WestPoint,where he chaired the lecture-and-entertainment committee.He had spentmany hours with a friend, discussing ev-erything from history to the theory ofrelativity. He loved the theatre. In theevenings,he could often be found sittingby the fireplace in the living room of hiscommanding officer, sipping tea and lis-tening to Tchaikovsky. As a boy, he oncesaw his father kill a hawk and had beenrepulsed. When he went into active ser-vice, he wrote a friend to say that he hadno feelings of hate, and did not think hecould ever kill anyone out of hatred. Hehad none of the swagger of the natu-ral warrior. He worked hard and had astrong sense of duty.

In the second week of January, theJapanese attacked, slipping hundreds of snipers through the American lines,climbing into trees, turning the battle-field into what Reck calls a “gigantic possum hunt.” On the morning of Jan-

uary 12th, Nininger went to his com-manding officer. He wanted, he said, tobe assigned to another company, onethat was in the thick of the action, so hecould go hunting for Japanese snipers.

He took several grenades and ammu-nition belts, slung a Garand rifle over hisshoulder,and grabbed a submachine gun.Starting at the point where the fight-ing was heaviest—near the position ofthe battalion’s K Company—he crawledthrough the jungle and shot a Japanesesoldier out of a tree. He shot and killedsnipers. He threw grenades into enemypositions. He was wounded in the leg,but he kept going, clearing out Japa-nese positions for the other members ofK Company, behind him. He soon ranout of grenades and switched to his rifle,and then, when he ran out of ammu-nition, used only his bayonet. He waswounded a second time, but when amedic crawled toward him to help bringhim back behind the lines Niningerwaved him off.He saw a Japanese bunkerup ahead. As he leaped out of a shellhole, he was spun around by a bullet tothe shoulder, but he kept charging at thebunker,where a Japanese officer and twoenlisted men were dug in.He dispatchedone soldier with a double thrust of hisbayonet, clubbed down the other, andbayonetted the officer. Then, with out-stretched arms, he collapsed face down.For his heroism, Nininger was posthu-mously awarded the Medal of Honor,the first American soldier so decoratedin the Second World War.

Suppose that you were a senior Armyofficer in the early days of the Sec-

ond World War and were trying to puttogether a crack team of fearless and fe-rocious fighters. Sandy Nininger, it nowappears, had exactly the right kind ofpersonality for that assignment, but isthere any way you could have knownthis beforehand? It clearly wouldn’t havehelped to ask Nininger if he was fearless

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42 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 20, 2004

ANNALS OF PSYCHOLOGY

PERSONALITY PLUS

Employers love personality tests. But what do they really reveal?

BY MALCOLM GLADWELL

and ferocious, because he didn’t knowthat he was fearless and ferocious. Norwould it have worked to talk to peoplewho spent time with him. His friendwould have told you only that Niningerwas quiet and thoughtful and loved thetheatre, and his commanding officerwould have talked about the evenings oftea and Tchaikovsky. With the excep-tion, perhaps, of the Scarlet Pimpernel,a love of music, theatre, and long after-noons in front of a teapot is not a knownpredictor of great valor. What you needis some kind of sophisticated psycholog-ical instrument, capable of getting to theheart of his personality.

Over the course of the past century,psychology has been consumed with thesearch for this kind of magical instru-ment. Hermann Rorschach proposedthat great meaning lay in the way thatpeople described inkblots. The creatorsof the Minnesota Multiphasic Person-ality Inventory believed in the revela-tory power of true-false items such as “Ihave never had any black, tarry-lookingbowel movements” or “If the moneywere right, I would like to work for a cir-cus or a carnival.” Today, Annie MurphyPaul tells us in her fascinating new book,“Cult of Personality,” that there aretwenty-five hundred kinds of person-ality tests. Testing is a four-hundred-million-dollar-a-year industry. A heftypercentage of American corporationsuse personality tests as part of the hiringand promotion process.The tests figurein custody battles and in sentencing and parole decisions. “Yet despite theirprevalence—and the importance of thematters they are called upon to decide—personality tests have received surpris-ingly little scrutiny,” Paul writes.We cancall in the psychologists. We can giveSandy Nininger a battery of tests. Butwill any of it help?

One of the most popular personalitytests in the world is the Myers-

Briggs Type Indicator (M.B.T.I.), apsychological-assessment system basedon Carl Jung’s notion that people makesense of the world through a series ofpsychological frames. Some people areextroverts, some are introverts. Someprocess information through logicalthought.Some are directed by their feel-ings. Some make sense of the worldthrough intuitive leaps. Others collect

data through their senses.To these threecategories—(I)ntroversion/(E)xtrover-sion, i(N)tuition/(S)ensing, (T)hink-ing/(F)eeling—the Myers-Briggs testadds a fourth: ( J)udging/(P)erceiving.Judgers “like to live in a planned, orderlyway, seeking to regulate and managetheir lives,” according to an M.B.T.I.guide, whereas Perceivers “like to live in

a flexible, spontaneous way, seeking toexperience and understand life, ratherthan control it.” The M.B.T.I. asks thetest-taker to answer a series of “forced-choice” questions, where one choiceidentifies you as belonging to one ofthese paired traits. The basic test takestwenty minutes, and at the end you arepresented with a precise, multidimen-sional summary of your personality—your type might be INTJ or ESFP,or some other combination. Two and a half million Americans a year take the Myers-Briggs. Eighty-nine compa-nies out of the Fortune 100 make use of it, for things like hiring or train-ing sessions to help employees “under-stand” themselves or their colleagues.Annie Murphy Paul says that at the em-

inent consulting firm McKinsey, “ ‘as-sociates’ often know their colleagues’four-letter M.B.T.I. types by heart,”the way they might know their ownweight or (this being McKinsey) theirS.A.T. scores.

It is tempting to think, then, that we could figure out the Myers-Briggstype that corresponds best to commando

work,and then test to see whether SandyNininger fits the profile. Unfortunately,the notion of personality type is notnearly as straightforward as it appears.For example, the Myers-Briggs poses a series of items grouped around theissue of whether you—the test-taker—are someone who likes to plan your dayor evening beforehand or someone whoprefers to be spontaneous. The idea isobviously to determine whether you be-long to the Judger or Perceiver camp,but the basic question here is surprisinglyhard to answer. I think I’m someone wholikes to be spontaneous. On the otherhand, I have embarked on too manyspontaneous evenings that ended upwith my friends and me standing on the sidewalk, looking at each other andJO

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Eighty-nine of the Fortune 100 companies use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

wondering what to do next. So I guessI’m a spontaneous person who recog-nizes that life usually goes more smoothlyif I plan first, or, rather, I’m a personwho prefers to be spontaneous only ifthere’s someone around me who isn’t.Does that make me spontaneous or not?I’m not sure. I suppose it means that I’msomewhere in the middle.

This is the first problem with theMyers-Briggs. It assumes that we are ei-ther one thing or another—Intuitive orSensing, Introverted or Extroverted.Butpersonality doesn’t fit into neat binarycategories: we fall somewhere along acontinuum.

Here’s another question:

Would you rather work under a boss (or a teacher) who is

good-natured but often inconsistent, orsharp-tongued but always logical?

On the Myers-Briggs, this is one ofa series of questions intended to estab-lish whether you are a Thinker or aFeeler. But I’m not sure I know how toanswer this one, either. I once had agood-natured boss whose inconsistencybothered me, because he exerted a greatdeal of day-to-day control over mywork. Then I had a boss who was quiteconsistent and very sharp-tongued—butat that point I was in a job where day-to-day dealings with my boss were minimal,so his sharp tongue didn’t matter thatmuch. So what do I want in a boss? Asfar as I can tell, the only plausible answeris: It depends. The Myers-Briggs as-sumes that who we are is consistent fromone situation to another.But surely whatwe want in a boss, and how we behavetoward our boss, is affected by what kindof job we have.

This is the gist of the now famouscritique that the psychologist WalterMischel has made of personality test-ing. One of Mischel’s studies involvedwatching children interact with one an-other at a summer camp.Aggressivenesswas among the traits that he was inter-ested in, so he watched the children infive different situations: how they be-haved when approached by a peer, whenteased by a peer, when praised by anadult, when punished by an adult, andwhen warned by an adult.He found thathow aggressively a child responded inone of those situations wasn’t a goodpredictor of how that same child re-sponded in another situation. Just be-

cause a boy was aggressive in the face ofbeing teased by another boy didn’t meanthat he would be aggressive in the faceof being warned by an adult. On theother hand, if a child responded aggres-sively to being teased by a peer one day,it was a pretty good indicator that he’drespond aggressively to being teased by a peer the next day.We have a personal-ity in the sense that we have a consis-tent pattern of behavior. But that pat-tern is complex and that personality iscontingent: it represents an interactionbetween our internal disposition andtendencies and the situations that wefind ourselves in.

It’s not surprising, then, that theMyers-Briggs has a large problem withconsistency: according to some studies,more than half of those who take thetest a second time end up with a differ-ent score than when they took it the firsttime. Since personality is continuous,not dichotomous, clearly some peoplewho are borderline Introverts or Feelersone week slide over to Extroversion orThinking the next week. And since per-sonality is contingent,not stable,how weanswer is affected by which circum-stances are foremost in our minds whenwe take the test. If I happen to remem-ber my first boss, then I come out as aThinker. If my mind is on my secondboss, I come out as a Feeler. When Itook the Myers-Briggs, I scored as anINTJ. But, if odds are that I’m going tobe something else if I take the test again,what good is it?

Once, for fun, a friend and I de-vised our own personality test. Like theM.B.T.I., it has four dimensions. Thefirst is Canine/Feline. In romantic rela-tionships, are you the pursuer, who runshappily to the door, tail wagging? Or areyou the pursued? The second is More/Different. Is it your intellectual style togather and master as much informationas you can or to make imaginative use ofa discrete amount of information? Thethird is Insider/Outsider. Do you getalong with your parents or do you de-fine yourself outside your relationshipwith your mother and father? And, fi-nally, there is Nibbler/Gobbler. Do youwork steadily, in small increments, or doeverything at once, in a big gulp? I’mquite pleased with the personality inven-tory we devised. It directly touches onfour aspects of life and temperament—

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44 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 20, 2004

romance, cognition, family, and workstyle—that are only hinted at by Myers-Briggs.And it can be completed in undera minute, nineteen minutes faster thanMyers-Briggs, an advantage not to bedismissed in today’s fast-paced businessenvironment.Of course, the four traits itmeasures are utterly arbitrary, based onwhat my friend and I came up with overthe course of a phone call. But thenagain surely all universal dichotomoustyping systems are arbitrary.

Where did the Myers-Briggs comefrom, after all? As Paul tells us, it beganwith a housewife from Washington,D.C., named Katharine Briggs, at theturn of the last century. Briggs had adaughter, Isabel, an only child for whom(as one relative put it) she did “every-thing but breathe.”When Isabel was stillin her teens, Katharine wrote a book-length manuscript about her daughter’sremarkable childhood, calling her a “ge-nius” and “a little Shakespeare.” WhenIsabel went off to Swarthmore College,in 1915, the two exchanged letters nearlyevery day.Then, one day, Isabel broughthome her college boyfriend and an-nounced that they were to be married.His name was Clarence (Chief ) Myers.He was tall and handsome and study-ing to be a lawyer, and he could not havebeen more different from the Briggswomen. Katharine and Isabel were boldand imaginative and intuitive. Myerswas practical and logical and detail-oriented. Katharine could not under-stand her future son-in-law. “When the blissful young couple returned toSwarthmore,” Paul writes, “Katharineretreated to her study, intent on ‘figuringout Chief.’ ”

She began to read widely in psychol-ogy and philosophy. Then, in 1923, shecame across the first English translationof Carl Jung’s “Psychological Types.”“This is it!”Katharine told her daughter.Paul recounts, “In a dramatic display ofconviction she burned all her own re-search and adopted Jung’s book as her‘Bible,’ as she gushed in a letter to the

man himself.His system explained it all:Lyman [Katharine’s husband], Kathar-ine, Isabel, and Chief were introverts;the two men were thinkers, while thewomen were feelers; and of course theBriggses were intuitives,while Chief wasa senser.”Encouraged by her mother, Is-abel—who was living in Swarthmoreand writing mystery novels—devised apaper-and-pencil test to help peopleidentify which of the Jungian categoriesthey belonged to, and then spent the restof her life tirelessly and brilliantly pro-moting her creation.

The problem, as Paul points out, isthat Myers and her mother did not actu-ally understand Jung at all. Jung didn’tbelieve that types were easily identifi-able, and he didn’t believe that peoplecould be permanently slotted into onecategory or another. “Every individual isan exception to the rule,” he wrote; to“stick labels on people at first sight,” inhis view,was “nothing but a childish par-lor game.” Why is a parlor game basedon my desire to entertain my friends anyless valid than a parlor game based onKatharine Briggs’s obsession with herson-in-law?

The problems with the Myers-Briggssuggest that we need a test that is

responsive to the complexity and vari-ability of the human personality. Andthat is why, not long ago, I found myselfin the office of a psychologist from NewJersey named Lon Gieser. He is amongthe country’s leading experts on what iscalled the Thematic Apperception Test(T.A.T.), an assessment tool developedin the nineteen-thirties by Henry Mur-ray, one of the most influential psychol-ogists of the twentieth century.

I sat in a chair facing Gieser, as ifI were his patient. He had in his handtwo dozen or so pictures—mostly black-and-white drawings—on legal-sizedcards, all of which had been chosen by Murray years before. “These picturespresent a series of scenes,” Gieser said to me. “What I want you to do witheach scene is tell a story with a begin-ning, a middle, and an end.” He handedme the first card. It was of a young boy looking at a violin. I had imagined,as Gieser was describing the test to me, that it would be hard to come upwith stories to match the pictures. As Iquickly discovered, though, the exercise

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was relatively effortless: the stories justtumbled out.

“This is a young boy,” I began.

His parents want him to take up the violin,and they’ve been encouraging him. I think heis uncertain whether he wants to be a violinplayer, and maybe even resents the impositionof having to play this instrument, whichdoesn’t seem to have any appeal for him. He’snot excited or thrilled about this. He’d ratherbe somewhere else. He’s just sitting therelooking at it, and dreading having to fulfillthis parental obligation.

I continued in that vein for a fewmore minutes. Gieser gave me anothercard, this one of a muscular man cling-ing to a rope and looking off into thedistance. “He’s climbing up, not climb-ing down,” I said, and went on:

It’s out in public. It’s some kind of big square,in Europe, and there is some kind of spectaclegoing on. It’s the seventeenth or eighteenthcentury. The King is coming by in a carriage,and this man is shimmying up, so he can seeover everyone else and get a better view of theKing. I don’t get the sense that he’s any kindof highborn person. I think he aspires to bemore than he is. And he’s kind of getting aglimpse of the King as a way of giving himselfa sense of what he could be, or what his ownfuture could be like.

We went on like this for the bet-ter part of an hour, as I responded totwelve cards—each of people in variouskinds of ambiguous situations.One pic-ture showed a woman slumped on theground, with some small object next toher; another showed an attractive couplein a kind of angry embrace, apparentlyhaving an argument. (I said that the fightthey were having was staged, that eachwas simply playing a role.) As I talked,Gieser took notes. Later, he called meand gave me his impressions. “Whatcame out was the way you deal withemotion,” he said. “Even when you rec-ognized the emotion,you distanced your-self from it. The underlying motive isthis desire to avoid conflict. The otherthing is that when there are opportuni-ties to go to someone else and work stuffout, your character is always going offalone. There is a real avoidance of emo-tion and dealing with other people, andeveryone goes to their own corners andworks things out on their own.”

How could Gieser make such a con-fident reading of my personality afterlistening to me for such a short time? Iwas baffled by this, at first, because I feltthat I had told a series of random andidiosyncratic stories. When I listened to

the tape I had made of the session,though, I saw what Gieser had picked upon: my stories were exceedingly repeti-tive in just the way that he had identi-fied. The final card that Gieser gave mewas blank, and he asked me to imaginemy own picture and tell a story about it.For some reason, what came to mindwas Andrew Wyeth’s famous painting“Christina’s World,” of a woman alonein a field, her hair being blown by thewind. She was from the city, I said, andhad come home to see her family in thecountry: “I think she is taking a walk.She is pondering some piece of impor-tant news.She has gone off from the restof the people to think about it.” Onlylater did I realize that in the actual paint-ing the woman is not strolling throughthe field. She is crawling, desperately, onher hands and knees. How obviouscould my aversion to strong emotion be?

The T.A.T. has a number of cardsthat are used to assess achievement—

that is,how interested someone is in get-ting ahead and succeeding in life. One isthe card of the man on the rope; anotheris the boy looking at his violin.Gieser, inlistening to my stories, concluded that Iwas very low in achievement:

Some people say this kid is dreamingabout being a great violinist, and he’s going tomake it. With you, it wasn’t what he wantedto do at all. His parents were making him doit. With the rope climbing, some people dothis Tarzan thing. They climb the pole and getto the top and feel this great achievement.You have him going up the rope—and why ishe feeling the pleasure? Because he’s seeingthe King. He’s still a nobody in the publicsquare, looking at the King.

Now, this is a little strange. I considermyself quite ambitious. On a question-naire, if you asked me to rank how im-portant getting ahead and being suc-cessful was to me, I’d check the “veryimportant”box.But Gieser is suggestingthat the T.A.T. allowed him to glimpseanother dimension of my personality.

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46 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 20, 2004

FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF ANNE VERVEINE, VII

Distance was the house in which I welcomed you.But it was in the riverthat we became cadence, there where the current braided

together again, after the stone bridge stanchion parted the stream.It was to last only as long as the beauty lasted.Do you believe in the soul?

Words torn from the void, wet and mewling.Where we walked on the mountain, waterpoured around us, surged up from springs, seethed

down in rivulets, rocky streams, and one long blinding cascade:your kisses were an eau-de-vie and as bitter.I am poured out like water.

Distance is feminine in French.I held a knife to a man’s throat and let him bleed quietly into a cup.What does “us” mean?

Coiled serpentine headdress of Leonardo’s woman:you wanted her. I wanted you.Chill sunlight flexing itself on the city river

gave me the emptiness I neededto write these instructions: Sorrowis a liqueur. Drink deep. We will all be consumed.

—Rosanna Warren

This idea—that our personality canhold contradictory elements—is at theheart of “Strangers to Ourselves,”by thesocial psychologist Timothy D.Wilson.He is one of the discipline’s most prom-inent researchers, and his book is whatpopular psychology ought to be (andrarely is): thoughtful, beautifully writ-ten, and full of unexpected insights.Wilson’s interest is in what he calls the“adaptive unconscious” (not to be con-fused with the Freudian unconscious).The adaptive unconscious, in Wilson’sdescription, is a big computer in ourbrain which sits below the surface andevaluates, filters, and looks for patterns in the mountain of data that come inthrough our senses.That system,Wilsonargues, has a personality: it has a set ofpatterns and responses and tendenciesthat are laid down by our genes and ourearly-childhood experiences.These pat-terns are stable and hard to change, andwe are only dimly aware of them. Ontop of that, in his schema we have an-other personality: it’s the conscious iden-tity that we create for ourselves with thechoices we make, the stories we tell aboutourselves, and the formal reasons wecome up with to explain our motives andfeelings. Yet this “constructed self ” hasno particular connection with the per-sonality of our adaptive unconscious.In fact, they could easily be at odds.Wil-son writes:

The adaptive unconscious is more likelyto influence people’s uncontrolled, implicitresponses, whereas the constructed self ismore likely to influence people’s deliberative,explicit responses. For example, the quick,spontaneous decision of whether to arguewith a co-worker is likely to be under the con-trol of one’s nonconscious needs for powerand affiliation. A more thoughtful decisionabout whether to invite a co-worker over fordinner is more likely to be under the controlof one’s conscious, self-attributed motives.

When Gieser said that he thought Iwas low in achievement, then, he pre-sumably saw in my stories an unconsciousambivalence toward success.The T.A.T.,he believes, allowed him to go beyondthe way I viewed myself and arrive at areading with greater depth and nuance.

Even if he’s right, though, does thishelp us pick commandos? I’m not sosure. Clearly, underneath Sandy Ninin-ger’s peaceful façade there was anotherNininger capable of great bravery andferocity, and a T.A.T.of Nininger mighthave given us a glimpse of that part of

who he was. But let’s not forget that hevolunteered for the front lines: he madea conscious decision to put himself inthe heat of the action. What we reallyneed is an understanding of how thosetwo sides of his personality interact incritical situations.When is Sandy Ninin-ger’s commitment to peacefulness more,or less, important than some uncon-scious ferocity?

The other problem with the T.A.T.,of course, is that it’s a subjective instru-ment.You could say that my story aboutthe man climbing the rope is evidencethat I’m low in achievement or you couldsay that it shows a strong desire for so-cial mobility. The climber wants to lookdown—not up—at the King in order toget a sense “of what he could be.” Youcould say that my interpretation that thecouple’s fighting was staged was evi-dence of my aversion to strong emotion.Or you could say that it was evidence of my delight in deception and role-playing. This isn’t to question Gieser’sskill or experience as a diagnostician.The T.A.T. is supposed to do no morethan identify themes and problem areas,and I’m sure Gieser would be happy to put me on the couch for a year to ex-plore those themes and see which of hisinitial hypotheses had any validity. Butthe reason employers want a magicalinstrument for measuring personality is that they don’t have a year to workthrough the ambiguities. They need ananswer now.

Alarger limitation of both Myers-Briggs and the T.A.T. is that they

are indirect.Tests of this kind require usfirst to identify a personality trait thatcorresponds to the behavior we’re inter-ested in, and then to figure out how tomeasure that trait—but by then we’retwo steps removed from what we’reafter. And each of those steps representsan opportunity for error and distortion.Shouldn’t we try, instead, to test directlyfor the behavior we’re interested in? Thisis the idea that lies behind what’s knownas the Assessment Center, and the lead-ing practitioner of this approach is a com-pany called Development DimensionsInternational, or D.D.I.Companies try-ing to evaluate job applicants send themto D.D.I.’s headquarters, outside Pitts-burgh, where they spend the day role-playing as business executives. When I

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contacted D.D.I., I was told that I wasgoing to be Terry Turner, the head of therobotics division of a company calledGlobal Solutions.

I arrived early in the morning,and wasled to an office. On the desk was a com-puter, a phone,and a tape recorder. In thecorner of the room was a video camera,and on my desk was an agenda for the day.I had a long telephone conversation witha business partner from France. Therewere labor difficulties at an overseasplant. A new product—a robot for thehome—had run into a series of technicalglitches. I answered e-mails. I preparedand recorded a talk for a product-launchmeeting. I gave a live interview to a localtelevision reporter. In the afternoon, Imet with another senior Global Solu-tions manager, and presented a strategicplan for the future of the robotics divi-sion. It was a long,demanding day at theoffice, and when I left, a team of D.D.I.specialists combed through copies of mye-mails, the audiotapes of my phone callsand my speech,and the videotapes of myinterviews, and analyzed me across fourdimensions: interpersonal skills, leader-ship skills, business-management skills,and personal attributes.A few weeks later,I was given my report. Some of it waspositive: I was a quick learner. I had goodideas. I expressed myself well, and—Iwas relieved to hear—wrote clearly.But,as the assessment of my performancemade plain, I was something less thantop management material:

Although you did a remarkable job ad-dressing matters, you tended to handle issuesfrom a fairly lofty perch, pitching good ideas

somewhat unilaterally while lobbing sup-porting rationale down to the team below. . . .Had you brought your team closer to deci-sions by vesting them with greater account-ability, responsibility and decision-makingauthority, they would have undoubtedly feltmore engaged, satisfied and valued. . . .

In a somewhat similar vein, but on aslightly more interpersonal level, while youseemed to recognize the value of collabora-tion and building positive working relation-ships with people, you tended to take a purelybusinesslike approach to forging partner-ships. You spoke of win/win solutions from abusiness perspective and your rationale forpartnering and collaboration seemed to bebased solely on business logic. Additionally,at times you did not respond to some of thesofter, subtler cues that spoke to people’s realfrustrations, more personal feelings, or truepoint of view.

Ouch! Of course, when the D.D.I.analysts said that I did not respond to“some of the softer, subtler cues thatspoke to people’s real frustrations, morepersonal feelings, or true point of view,”they didn’t mean that I was an insensitiveperson. They meant that I was insensi-tive in the role of manager. The T.A.T.and M.B.T.I. aimed to make global as-sessments of the different aspects of mypersonality. My day as Terry Turner wasmeant to find out only what I’m likewhen I’m the head of the robotics divi-sion of Global Solutions. That’s an im-portant difference. It respects the role of situation and contingency in person-ality. It sidesteps the difficulty of inte-grating my unconscious self with myconstructed self by looking at the waythat my various selves interact in the realworld.Most important, it offers the hopethat with experience and attention I canconstruct a more appropriate executive

“self.” The Assessment Center is proba-bly the best method that employers havefor evaluating personality.

But could an Assessment Center helpus identify the Sandy Niningers of theworld? The center makes a behavioralprediction, and, as solid and specific asthat prediction is, people are least pre-dictable at those critical moments whenprediction would be most valuable. Theanswer to the question of whether myTerry Turner would be a good executiveis, once again: It depends. It depends onwhat kind of company Global Solutionsis, and on what kind of respect my co-workers have for me,and on how quicklyI manage to correct my shortcomings,and on all kinds of other things that can-not be anticipated. The quality of beinga good manager is, in the end, as irre-ducible as the quality of being a goodfriend. We think that a friend has to be loyal and nice and interesting—andthat’s certainly a good start. But peoplewhom we don’t find loyal, nice, or inter-esting have friends, too, because loyalty,niceness, and interestingness are emer-gent traits.They arise out of the interac-tion of two people, and all we reallymean when we say that someone is in-teresting or nice is that they are interest-ing or nice to us.

All these difficulties do not mean thatwe should give up on the task of tryingto understand and categorize one an-other. We could certainly send SandyNininger to an Assessment Center, andfind out whether, in a make-believe bat-tle, he plays the role of commando withverve and discipline.We could talk to hisfriends and discover his love of musicand theatre. We could find out how heresponded to the picture of the man on arope. We could sit him down and havehim do the Myers-Briggs and dutifullynote that he is an Introverted, Intuitive,Thinking Judger, and, for good measure,take an extra minute to run him throughmy own favorite personality inventoryand type him as a Canine, Different, In-sider Gobbler.We will know all kinds ofthings about him then. His personnelfile will be as thick as a phone book, andwe can consult our findings whenever wemake decisions about his future.We justhave to acknowledge that his file will tellus little about the thing we’re most in-terested in. For that, we have to join himin the jungles of Bataan. ♦

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“If you’re not doing anything after work, come by the conference room. We’re going to be cracking open some

beers and throwing some burgers on the copier.”