The leadership thing

Leadership is rather like pornography. You know it when you see it. How you acquire it is a mystery. They don't teach it in college.

It's not just leadership. They don't teach wisdom either -- another essential for a happy, successful life. As an undergraduate, the Observer nailed the Treaty of Westphalia but missed the larger truth that the right answer to any number of questions in life changes with time.

If you want to talk leadership, head for the wilds of Medford and Robert Sternberg, the smarty psychologist Tufts president Larry Bacow lured from Yale last summer to become his dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. Sternberg, a wonderful thinker, has made a career out of plumbing the depths of leadership, intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. His new mandate is to introduce these concepts to Tufts undergraduates.

''Leadership is the purpose of a college education," he says. ''I'm talking about leadership with a very small 'l' -- everyday skills you use in the family, at work, on teams, at church."

It requires creativity to dream up new ideas and practical intelligence to implement them -- execution is the hardest part of leadership -- along with wisdom to make sure your ideas balance your needs with the common good.

Creativity, he says, is an attitude toward life, not an inborn ability. ''When it comes to ideas, you buy low and sell high, like a good investor." It takes courage, he says, to embrace unpopular ideas. Consider Gandhi's tactic of nonviolence.

You'll find no such insights in academe. ''Our education system is idiotic," says Sternberg. ''We're actually going backwards. There's more emphasis on mindless thinking. What matters is how you use information. A manager won't last long on IQ alone." (Hello, Larry Summers.)

Sternberg is careful not to trash standardized tests themselves. ''The problem is misdefined," he explains. ''Before the tests, you got into Harvard based on how much money your parents gave or your last name. Tests were developed to protect against that. The problem is the narrowness of the tests."

So while at Yale, Sternberg dreamed up the Rainbow Project, which developed new assessment tools to supplement the horrid college admission process. They were introduced at about 1,000 colleges, and the results, to be published soon in the journal Intelligence, were bracing. These tools significantly flattened the performance differences among whites and minorities and improved the prediction of freshman performance.

Applicants were presented a title like ''The Octopus's Sneakers" and told to write a short story from it. A New Yorker-like cartoon and told to write a caption for it. A practical problem and told to solve it. To wit: A student is assigned to a dorm triple in which one bedroom is bigger than the other. All three roommates want it. What to do?

Starting in 2007, Tufts will introduce the meat of this into its admissions process. Sternberg, who did admissions work at Yale, believes Tufts will be the first college in the country to explicitly measure creative and practical skills. ''Our goal is to get better students and send a message that these things really matter," he says. ''The great students will get in anyway. This is about the middle. The hard part is the middle."

Tufts will also open a new learning center this summer to teach teachers how to teach to diverse learners and assess their skills. Better yet, in the fall of 2007, Tufts will offer a minor in leadership to undergraduates in the School of Arts and Sciences that will incorporate much of his thinking.

They'll learn to appreciate other points of view, to perceive how people perceive them, to clarify their own strengths and weaknesses, and then compensate for the weaknesses. They'll learn that formulas change and that unlike a multiple choice test, solutions are contextualized.

How come no one taught me any of this?

The man is also near and dear to my heart because he honors the skills of the ''Happy Bottom Quarter" -- the much-maligned C students who often go on to run brokerage houses, law firms, countries. Credit them with the emotional smarts to figure out there's no point in herniating yourself in the classroom when what matters are relationships that will yield rich benefits for the rest of your life.

''It's the skills, not just the relationships," he corrects. ''They learn early that they'll never get anywhere trying to be the best student, so they must develop another set of skills to achieve. This is the tacit knowledge to know what they need to succeed. The correlation between academic and practical intelligence is, like, zero."

In a similar vein, Sternberg cites the disconnect between academic eclat and later success in life he encounters when fund-raising among wealthy Tufts graduates.

''None of the people I talk to were straight A's and 800s," he says. ''They're some of the most successful graduates and they don't fit the standard profile. There has to be something wrong."

Sam Allis's e-mail address is allis@globe.com.