TED Community » Leland Beaumont

About Me

Leland R. Beaumont is the creator and webmaster of the emotional competency website. Trained as an electrical engineer, computer scientist, quality technologist, and new product developer he is a system thinker who is constantly curious about how the world works.

In September, 1993 he attended a professional conference on new product development. One of the talks described petty personal disagreements between development team managers that persisted, escalated, and prevented the team from working together effectively. Infighting became more important than product development. As a result, the product development failed at a cost of millions of dollars. Unfortunately this story is much too common. Understanding the wasteful costs of ineffective interpersonal interactions he proposed developing a “model for constructive human interaction”. Although nothing came of the idea at that time, he has remained intrigued by that thought ever since.

Several years later he was very content and productive working on a small, well-run new product development team. Inexplicably a tyrant was appointed to manage the rapidly expanding team. The result was a painful and costly disaster. People were miserable, spiteful, unproductive, diabolical, and wasteful. He soon dreaded going to work. The development projects failed and most of the engineering team members were fired soon after Mr. Beaumont retired from the organization in July, 2001. In a sarcastic twist on the title of the popular book Who Moved My Cheese? , he dreamed of writing an analogous book called Why Cheese Rots—the destruction of teamwork. After several failed writing attempts he began to take college psychology courses and read many well-researched books on interpersonal relations and human behavior topics. He began by studying power and motivation and went on to study human emotions and other topics. In November, 2005 he began this emotional competency website and has worked on it ever since.

His recently written “Guidelines for Working Together” represents a major step towards the “model for constructive human interaction” he conceived more than 14 years ago.

The website is a hobby that he hopes others will find useful. He enjoys continuing to learn about emotional competency as he works to apply the concepts in his day-to-day interactions. He believes his scientific background combined with his analytical strengths and system thinking skills can bring a new and valuable perspective to this important topic. He believes that emotional competency is the missing skill that can be taught, studied, and learned. His long-term goal is to see emotional competency routinely and effectively taught in homes, schools, businesses, and workshops. Perhaps this can make the world a better place. You can let him know your thoughts at the email address given below.

He sometimes writes using the pen name “The Peripatetic” — The Wandering Philosopher.

He has written and published the book ISO 9001, The Standard Interpretation and is the co-author of the book Content Networking . He holds US Patent Number 6,959,333: Technique for content delivery over the internet. He works as a consultant in the areas of Quality Technology, Content Networking, New Product Development, and Technology Architecture. He is happily married and is proud of the couple's two adult children. His other hobbies include hiking, bike riding, fitness, and photography.