Brain: Doris Taylor

Earl Bakken, my mother, Bill Clinton (OK, maybe not people smart, but he is a very intelligent man).

Leonardo da Vinci. He was curious, he thought about things not thought of before, he dreamed about never-before-conceived ideas and devices, he seems to have been relatively fearless in pursuing his dreams and ideas—even in the face of persecution. I would put Michelangelo right there with him for that reason.

The Inner Path from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Terry Cole–Whittaker, Life and Teachings of the Masters of the Far East by Baird T. Spalding, and the Harvard Business Review—it saves my life frequently at work.

You can do this.

My mom; Leslie Leinwand, my postdoctoral adviser; Pascal Goldschmidt, my former boss at Duke; and Earl Bakken.

Obama—because I believe we are all in this together and have a responsibility to make the world a better place. Civil liberties, equal rights, all of those things I don’t take for granted having grown up in Mississippi.

I think the worst error of judgment I have ever made is trusting people who I thought had my back and didn’t professionally. I think science is about sharing ideas, and I have learned the hard way that not everyone feels that way. Which brings me to why I wish I were more people smart.

Read books, shop for groceries for teenagers, and cook. Meditate. I used to do a little politics, but now I drive teenagers.

Absolutely.

Tie between business and people. Business is about people and relationships, so I guess if I were people smart I might have a shot at finding people who are business smart.

Louis Armstrong—I love jazz—and Mozart.

Human imagination.

Ask me in ten years. :-) Do I like to think I am smarter today than I was ten years ago? Yes.

I think with introspection (which I think is a corollary of the ability to have second-order thought) comes responsibility to share knowledge and insights with others in a way that is considerate. We all have a responsibility to give back. And with intelligence (if I may) goes a responsibility to conceive of new ideas and new ways of doing or being and then to help others make those a reality.