Insensitivity is essential to survival in business because, in the words one leader, it lets you sleep when others can't, writes LUCY KELLAWAY

EVERY ONCE in a very long while, someone says something that is so original, so daring and so true that (to quote Dr Hook) it makes your pants want to get up and dance.

A week or so ago Jon Moulton was asked by the FT to name his three strongest character traits. He replied: determination, curiosity and insensitivity. As the first two characteristics were a bit ho-hum, they may have lulled some readers into missing the third.

Others may have been briefly startled to hear the celebrated private equity man congratulate himself on being insensitive but reasoned that, as he is a maverick and stinking rich, he can say what he likes. Moulton was simply being Moulton.

But I read his answer and knew he had just uttered the single most sensible word that I’d seen on the flabby subject of leadership in at least a decade.

Insensitivity is essential to survival in business. (Actually, I think it’s pretty important for survival in life, too – but that’s another story.)

According to Moulton, the great thing about being insensitive is that it “lets you sleep when others can’t”. I seized on this remark and put it together with something that Lord Browne had said to me the previous week, when he’d let slip that, in 40 years at BP, he hadn’t lost one night’s sleep because of work. If you are the sort of person who loses sleep, you can’t be a CEO, he said.

By combining Moulton and Browne, I get this syllogism. CEOs must sleep. Insensitivity is vital for sleep. Therefore, CEOs should be insensitive.

This is surely right. Being the boss means you need to be able to take decisions that will hurt individual people. If you are sensitive you will dither and prevaricate, or you will do the necessary but then toss and turn fretting about the consequences.

This realisation overturns the theory that has held sway for the past 15 years – that emotional intelligence (which means doing a lot of empathising) is the single most important thing that distinguishes winners from losers.

Insensitive people are supposed to be dreadful at leading because they can’t read emotion and easily succumb to arrogance or bullying behaviour. This strikes me as unfair: the insensitive aren’t obviously more monstrous than the rest of us, and they are certainly a lot simpler.

I have mostly enjoyed working for insensitive people as I find them restful and straightforward. An insensitive boss can be told what his failures are without going into a blind funk.

They don’t take things personally. And because they are insensitive, they help me behave better. If I know I’m not going to get rewarded for being needy, I have no choice but to tone it down a bit.

Of course, there are times when insensitivity can be a handicap. Sometimes a boss needs to know precisely how his staff are feeling. There are also times when a bit of human sympathy and kindness are called for. The solution is to outsource sensitivity: every senior management team needs one person who serves as the corporate box of tissues, and who tells the boss when he needs to respond to an emotion that he hasn’t picked up on.

Hand in hand with insensitivity goes denial. If you aren’t born insensitive you can acquire it by learning how to deny pesky feelings that get in the way. In fact, confidence comes as a result of denying the likelihood of failure.

Denial comes in handy not just for people destined for the top but for all workers. It is necessary to be in a state of mild denial before you get to work in the morning. True thoughts such as “this is pointless” or “it doesn’t matter if I do this or not” must be resolutely ignored.

I’m not arguing that emotional intelligence is altogether a bad thing. It is lovely in a friend, and may arguably be good in a spouse. In a boss what is needed is not to be out-and-out emotionally stupid, but mildly emotionally dyslexic.

If one wants proof that emotional intelligence is a disadvantage at work one only needs to look at women in corporate life. They are supposed to be great at reading emotion, and yet seem unable to make it to the top in any great number.

My new emotional dyslexia theory fits the facts much better. There is evidence that autism (chronic emotional illiteracy) is simply an extreme version of the male brain.

This means that the average man, armed with his mild emotional dyslexia, has a most unfair advantage in being well equipped to sail through a day in the office and sleep like a baby in his bed at night. – (Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2010)