As Howard Gardner himself puts it, “My chief claim to fame is my positing of . . . a theory of multiple intelligences.” He did that in his 1983 book, Frames of Mind, in which he argued that people have more kinds of intelligence than the one measured by paper-and-pencil IQ tests. In Changing Minds (Harvard Business School Press 2004), he identified three intelligences — linguistic, interpersonal, and existential — that are typically well-developed in business leaders.

Gardner, the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, isn’t a business writer. He has written, co-written, or edited more than 30 books in his long career, not one of which is directly about business. But his research on the human mind has expanded into the business world, partly through the GoodWork Project, a collaborative effort by investigators from Harvard, Stanford, and Claremont to see how people in different occupations define good work.

Which brings us to his most recent book, Five Minds for the Future (Harvard Business School Press 2006), in which he defines the kinds of minds we must have — disciplined, synthesizing, creative, respectful, and ethical — to ensure that good work continues in the generations to come. It’s probably not surprising that his discussion of ethics is what has attracted most attention in the business press.

CSC World: Why do you think the business press has focused on your discussion of ethics?

Gardner: Starting 25 to 30 years ago, a larger part of the American mentality, for elites as well as the general public, has been focused on business. Every major newspaper now has a separate business section, and there are all sorts of business magazines. So it’s much more in the limelight. And business gets more attention when it’s doing a bad job than when it’s satisfying its customers and shareholders.

But I would add that there’s been an unethical drift over those years that isn’t restricted to business but is most manifest in business.

CSC World: Why has there been an unethical drift?

Gardner: Alan Greenspan said that people have always been greedy, but now there are so many ways to be greedy.

Another thing I’ve been studying is that market ways of thinking are extraordinarily powerful in the United States at the present time. But we don’t have counterforces, such as different ideological perspectives or communal or religious pressures — other models of how society should work. If you talk to most Americans under 30, they think markets not only dominate everything but that they should. They can’t imagine that society could operate under a different set of rules.

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