From the March 2021 issue of Toronto Life
The Salesman
Jordan Peterson’s multimillion-dollar corporation, run by his daughter, churns out podcasts, life-coaching sessions, T-shirts, hats, self-help guides and surefire bestsellers. His new book revives the machine that made him globally famous—and nearly destroyed him
Before Jordan Peterson became the world’s most polarizing intellectual, he was a salesman. In the late 1990s, he flew to corporate HQs across North America to pitch a piece of hiring software called ExamCorp, a 90-minute psych assessment he’d developed with colleagues as a young assistant psychology professor at Harvard. It was simple, a personality test and some computerized tasks—click certain objects, generate words that start with, say, the letter H. Peterson told managers it could help them hire the right person for a position, and that tests like these had reliably predicted the job performance of corporate administrators, factory workers, pharmacists and U.S. Navy servicemen. No one bought it. They said it was too expensive, too time-consuming. They balked when they tried the test for themselves and didn’t like their results. When they asked Peterson who his other customers were, he had to admit that there were none.
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