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Tony Schwartz wrote this book to expiate the sin of ghostwriting Donald Trump's "The Art of the Deal." He prescribes a method by which anyone can attain moral excellence in their work. Unfortunately, as you can learn from Jeffrey Pfeffer's "Leadership BS," this method will not help anyone succeed in business. Schwartz fails to realize that Trump's fierce intentionality wasn't acquired but was inborn and that it is incompatible with moral excellence. In the third paragraph of "The Way We're Working Isn't Working" (also titled in an earlier addition, "Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys to Transforming the Way We Work and Live"), Tony Schwartz and his coauthors write, "The first key is fierce intentionality about managing the four key sources of energy that fuel us: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual" (p. ix). This highlighting of intentionality as the first key is unfortunate, first because it is a loaded term that once exposed undercuts everything else in this book, and second, because it is not one of the four keys of the subtitle. The four keys of the subtitle are a crude synthesis of Jung's four psychic functions with the four highest needs of Maslow's famous hierarchy, and they are the organizing principles of the book. While Maslow's hierarchy is much more culturally determined and less universally human than is usually admitted (see Hofstede, Hofstede, and Minkov, 2010, "Cultures and Organizations," pp. 213-216), it is hardly controversial. A vast number of self-help books begin with it. Under these categories, Schwartz gives good if pedestrian advice about diet, exercise, getting enough sleep and implementing better work habits. His Jungian influence comes out in his defense of the role of intuition in creativity. Intuition, he says, is "not the magical thinking that psychics claim to have . . . . [but] a nonverbal route to knowledge that arises not from rational deduction, but from seeing and sensing more deeply" (p. 212). However, this is magical thinking. The "deepness fallacy" which is central to the Jungian approach is in evidence throughout the book under the trendy guise of "fierce intentionality." Compare Schwartz's "Jungian" intuition with intuition as described in Daniel Kahneman's book "Thinking, Fast and Slow." Kahneman describes two sorts of intuition, expert and heuristic. Both are fast ways of problem solving in which we look for resemblances in our current problem to things we already know. The expert recognizes a resemblance to information that was stored in memory in the process of skill acquisition. This is complex information, and the ability to recall it quickly looks like magic to anyone lacking the expertise. However, "when the question is difficult and a skilled solution is not available . . . we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution" (p. 12). This answer is usually wrong. Most of what happens in individual as well as corporate economies can be explained statistically, but not causally. Kahneman says, "We easily think associatively, we think metaphorically, we think causally, but statistics requires thinking about many things at once" (p. 13). Intuition is not designed to think statistically. But, because it involves searching long-term memory for resemblances, it gives the appearance of "deepness." "Intentionality" is the new age word du jour. Schwartz never tries to explain it. The modifier "intentional" or "intentionally" occur--by my low-tech word count--38 times, and each instance could be eliminated without changing the meaning in any way. The only thing that these words add is the magical aura of "deepness." The concept that apparently is supposed to explain this usage is Peter M. Gollwitzer's "implementation intentions" which he discussed in the July 1999 issue of American Psychologist devoted to theories about "acts of will." Schwartz' "fierce intentionality" amounts to bypassing "efforts at self-control [that] fail [and] . . . replacing our negative habits . . . with positive rituals--highly specific behaviors that become automatic over time" (Be Excellent, p. 36). However, Gollwitzer cautions that "Effective willing . . . seems more closely associated with "cold" skillful cognitive strategies than with the "hot" determined mobilization of effort" ("Implementation Intentions," American Psychologist 54, no. 7 (1999), p. 500). The new age sense of "intentionality" which Schwartz is drawing on is "hot" and determined. He often uses "determined" synonymously with "intentional". Further, Gollwitzer notes that intentions are more successfully implemented when framed as "promotion goals . . . rather than prevention goals" ("Implementation Intentions," p. 494). Clearly, industrial safety programs are so difficult to implement successfully because they require the effort of constant vigilance and not merely ritual automaticity. Gollwitzer also explains that learning goals (how to perform a task) are easier to obtain than performance goals (how well one can perform a task) ("Implementation Intentions," p. 493). In other words, while everyone can learn to perform a task to some degree, excellence is as elusive and unexplainable as it has always been. Schwartz notes that "We are creatures of habit. Ninety-five per cent of our behaviors occur automatically" (Excellence, p.279). Apparently, he believes that "intentionality" is in the 5% of our actions that are consciously selected with which we can "prime" our automatic behaviors. However, in the same issue of American Psychologist, Irving Kirsch and Steven Lynn suggest that it is impossible to tell the difference between expectations of our responses and intentions, and that "at the moment of activation, all behavior is initiated automatically, rather than by conscious intention" ("Automaticity in Clinical Psychology," p. 508). Even if "a supervisory attentional system is a source of control over intentional behavior," it operates by activation and inhibition of the triggering of automatic processes which we perceive as intended actions ("Automaticity," p. 509). This leaves no room for "fierce intentionality" which is a fiction of Schwartz' magical thinking. The misspelling of a key word in a text that has been proof read by three coauthors and at least as many editors should arouse suspicion. Has more been overlooked than a letter? On page 30, the letter "t" has dropped out of "antacoluthia," the stoic doctrine of the mutual entailment of the virtues, or different categories of excellence. The word "anacoluthia," which is the result of Schwartz' misspelling, is the doctrine of inconsequence. It assumes that causality is merely apparent. Its practitioners are holy autistic fools who refuse to suspect any intentions behind events. Schwartz' footnote to "anacoluthia" refers to Michael Murphy's book The Future of the Body. In that book, "antacoluthia" is spelled correctly. Murphy mentions the term in his discussion of the interdependence of transformative practices. His source is John Dillon, former Berkeley and present Trinity College Dublin Professor of Classics. In his book The Middle Platonists, Dillon discusses each of the original sources for the term and suggests that while the 2nd century C.E. stoic Platonists taught antacoluthia, their contemporary Aristotelians argued against it. Murphy repeats Dillon's reference to Aristotle (Nichomachean Ethics 1144b32) where excellence is disambiguated into the excellence that is a disposition of the soul as opposed to the natural excellence of having internalized well the correct way to do something. Dillon (but not Murphy) also mentions Plato's dialogue the Protagoras in which Socrates is on a mission to use irony and sophistic refutations to show his fellow Athenians that the great sophist Protagoras has intentionally confused the two senses of excellence by claiming that, for a price, he can teach anyone to be excellent at anything, on the grounds that the true excellences are all one. Socrates asks Protagoras why, if excellence can be taught, are the sons of good men often worthless? In his book "Thinking Fast and Slow," Daniel Kahneman has answered that question: regression to the mean. This is the statistical fact that any performance which greatly exceeds the average is due to luck, and the performer will never attain that kind of excellence again. On the basis of their company's outstanding performance one year, many CEOs have been hired at bigger companies where they are paid much more money in the expectation that they will repeat that performance. They never do. There is a statistical explanation for this, but there is no causal explanation. This exceptional kind of excellence is truly an anacoluthon: it follows from, or is caused by, nothing. Only a holy fool can accept this, so people are willing to pay large amounts of money for causal explanations, and many books with causal systems and methods for attaining excellence are sold. They are all wrong. Protagoras tells Socrates that if there is anyone who is even a little better than others at helping people to attain excellence, so much the better: He claims to be one such man. I'm sure that Tony Schwartz is also one such man. However, he should rethink his anacoluthia and retract his claim to be able to teach excellence at anything. Lastly, the exercises in this book for developing creativity are based on the dated popular psychology of brain lateralization. Experimental evidence provides little support for correlating the structural differences between the sides of the brain with functional differences. The right brain is no more creative than the left brain, and exercises that try to tap that creativity are a waste of time.