The TQ Series
Transactional Intelligence®
HIGH TQ
Why It Matters More Than Expertise
Coming 4 August 2026
Dr. Marshall Goldsmith Thinkers50 #1 Executive Coach · New York Times bestselling author“TQ names a third intelligence... Practical, teachable, and long overdue.”
Book One of The TQ Series.
HIGH TQ is the flagship title — the complete case for why Transactional Intelligence® matters and how it works. It is the foundation from which every title in The TQ Series builds.
The TQ Series applies Transactional Intelligence® to the specific challenges that derail careers, teams, and organizations. This is where it begins.
Most careers are built on expertise. The working assumption: get good enough at what you do, and the right outcomes follow.
TQ exists because that assumption has a gap in it.
IQ tells you how you think. EQ tells you how you feel. TQ tells you what's actually happening in the exchange — and what to do about it.
What people call 'transactional' — cold, calculated, self-serving — is bad transacting. Forced transacting. Low TQ.
Transactional Intelligence® (TQ) is a structured methodology for navigating the hidden layer beneath every conversation — the human exchanges that produce every outcome. TQ makes those exchanges visible, so you can move through them consciously rather than be ruled by forces you cannot see.
This book gives you the method.
The Gap Isn't Your Expertise. It Never Was.
Sound Familiar?
— You agreed. Then resented it.
You say yes when you mean it. And no without breaking the relationship.
— Everyone nodded. Nothing got done.
The nods turn into commitments that hold.
— You ignored the signs. They quietly quit.
You catch the signs early, while there's still time to act.
— You know what you're worth. You keep taking less.
You name your worth. And stop taking less.
— The vision is clear to you. You can't get buy-in.
The vision lands. They own it with you.
These Aren't People Problems.
They're TQ Problems.
And TQ Problems Have Solutions.
Read the sample chapter free.
Chapters 1 and 2 put you in the room. Chapter 3 gives you the name for what you were watching.
Chapter 3 reclaims the word "transactional" from a decade of misuse, traces the expertise gap through medicine, law, engineering, and finance, and tells you plainly what this book will and won't do for you.
Read the Sample Chapter Free →The Foundation Work
The scholarly record of the tradition TQ is built on.
Before Transactional Intelligence became a practitioner methodology, its philosophical roots required a serious academic treatment. Trevor J. Phillips — a philosopher of education with a thirty-three year tenure at Bowling Green State University — produced that treatment as his 1966 dissertation.
Transactionalism: An Historical and Interpretive Study traces the lineage of the transactional tradition from Polybius and Galileo through Newton, the emergence of pragmatism, Dewey and Bentley, and into contemporary philosophy, psychology, and education. It is the scholarly foundation beneath The TQ Series.
Foreword by Kirkland Tibbels. Edited by Kirkland Tibbels and John Patterson. Published by Influence Ecology, LLC — the organization behind Influential U®.
About the Authors
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