Optimal
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  • Published: 16 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241609040
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $30.00

Optimal

How to Sustain Excellence Every Day

Formats & editions
Paperback
16 Sep 2025
Tr. Paperback
23 Jan 2024
EBook
11 Jan 2024
Audiobook
11 Jan 2024
Hardback
11 Feb 2024
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More than twenty-five years on from the huge bestseller Emotional Intelligence, this book reframes the concept's importance for a new era, explaining how to create high performing individuals, teams and organisations

Emotional intelligence is now embedded in our public discourse: an idea so pervasive and important in our work, culture, politics and society that leaders such as Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase and New York City mayor Eric Adams have placed it at the heart of what they do.

Daniel Goleman's bestselling book Emotional Intelligence was the first to coin this idea and bring it to a mass audience. Now, more than a quarter of a century after it was first published, he and Rutgers professor of psychology Cary Cherniss take a fresh look at how emotional intelligence has evolved over the past few decades, reframing its importance in this definitive book.

Beginning with a dissection of what makes for individual success, Goleman and Cherniss then set out how high performance can be cultivated at every level, scaling up the concept to top team performance and outstanding organisations. Building on attributes such as self-awareness, a sense of meaning and emotional balance, high concentration and 'flow' states, they demonstrate that it is in our optimal moments that our mental clarity shines.
  • Published: 16 September 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241609040
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $30.00
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About the authors

Daniel Goleman

Daniel Goleman is the author of the bestsellers Emotional Intelligence and Working with Emotional Intelligence. He received his PhD from Harvard and reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for the New York Times for twelve years. He was awarded the American Psychological Association's Lifetime Achievement Award and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Daniel Goleman is an internationally known psychologist and journalist. He is a co-founder of the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning at the Yale University Child Studies Centre (now at the University of Illinois at Chicago), co-chairman of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, based in the Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers University, and a member of the board of directors of the Mind & Life Institute. His book Emotional Intelligence was on the New York Times bestseller list for a year and a half, with nearly 6,000,000 copies in print worldwide in thirty languages.

Praise for Optimal

In the age of AI and machine intelligence, emotional intelligence is more important than ever for building a company culture that brings out the best in people and drives success. Anyone leading a team or organization should read Optimal—it will open your mind and show you the inner balance and skill set that we all need to face the future.

MARC BENIOFF, chair and CEO, Salesforce

No one has done more to help us understand the applications of emotional intelligence than Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss. In Optimal, they provide a lively overview of how to use emotional intelligence to optimize the performance of individuals, teams, and entire organizations, synthesizing more than three decades of findings. This book deserves to be studied by managers, coaches, therapists, affective scientists, and many others.

PETER SALOVEY, Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology and university president, Yale University

Powerful and deeply researched, Optimal offers actionable tools and insights that are essential to unlocking your potential, achieving stable success over time, building high-performing teams, and cultivating the most important leadership quality of all, emotional intelligence. From now on when I see a copy of this outstanding book on someone’s desk, their stock will have risen in my eyes.

OSCAR MUNOZ, former CEO, United Airlines, and author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Turnaround Time

Optimal describes how emotional intelligence, a strong sense of purpose, innovation, and systems thinking bring us to an optimal state, necessary to address our personal, organizational, and global challenges—essential wisdom for our times.

JONATHAN ROSE, CEO, Rose Companies

Optimal offers a masterclass in emotional intelligence and sustainable high performance. Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss skillfully combine cutting-edge research, engaging examples, and practical insights that are both illuminating and actionable. Their expertise has been invaluable in helping us develop emotionally intelligent and EPIC leaders at Amazon—ones who lead with empathy, purpose, inspiration, and connection. This book is a must-read for anyone seeking to enhance their leadership skills, relationships, and overall success—both professionally and personally.

RICH HUA, worldwide head of EPIC Leadership, Amazon Web Services