OLIVIA WAS BORN in Paris in 1979. Her father was French, and a physical chemist; her mother, an American psychotherapist. Though Olivia spoke French fluently, she was ostracized at school. A picture from Olivia’s pre-teens shows a group of coiffed, Parisian children—a 1990s tableau of perky ponytails, doll-like features, and brightly colored sweaters. The children beam at the camera, glowing with enthusiasm. All except Olivia, whose smile hangs limply. Her round glasses and dark, heavy features jar with her classmates’ airy blondeness. She appears to be surrounded by a cushion of space, as the children around her are repelled toward their other neighbors.

Part of the problem, Olivia recalls, was that she didn’t fit into any prescribed social group: She was too athletic for the nerds, too bookish for the jocks. She liked science fiction but also enjoyed dressage. Her mother, sensing that something was amiss, tried to help her daughter fit in by dressing Olivia in an American interpretation of French fashion: frilly, floral outfits ornamented with gloves and bows. The other kids called her a poser. “To them, I was always the weird American,” Olivia said recently. “It was obvious to everyone except my mother. Fitting in was something she desperately wanted for me, but all I did was stand out for the wrong reasons.” The awkward child became a dorky teen. The popular girls grew willowy; Olivia developed a curvy, athletic build. Flirting came as second nature to most of her peers, but Olivia was baffled by the subtleties of social interaction. She was too blunt, others told her. Too honest. Too much like her ultra-rational scientist father, who liked to work by “thinking like a molecule” And there was something unusual in her speech patterns, too. The young Olivia would butt into conversations and then become exhausted. She had a tendency to overshare, bursting forth with information like a conversational water balloon.

Olivia’s behavior may sound like an indication of Asperger syndrome, a mild form of autism. But there is a crucial difference between an awkward teen and many young people on the autistic spectrum: Olivia was keenly aware of her social rejection. She recognized the disappointment in the face of her mother, who desperately wanted her daughter to fit into French society; she felt the scorn of her classmates; she sensed that she was saying and doing the wrong things, but she couldn’t figure out how to make people like her.

Olivia’s worst years came after her parents transferred her from a diverse international school to Lycée Victor Duruy, a small, elite high school in a wealthy district of Paris. The building was blocks from the Eiffel Tower and served some of the oldest families in France.

At her new school, she wasn’t just the weird American; she was the weird, lower-class American. According to Olivia, her French teacher even announced to the class that, because of her non-intellectual hobbies like swimming and skiing, the only thing Olivia was fit to become was a garbage collector. Her new classmates were similarly cruel: She learned some had banded together to form a “Let’s get Olivia kicked out of school” club.

“It wasn’t a pretty time,” Olivia said. “I didn’t have the tools back then to interact with other humans. So I survived by going numb.”

Her grades suffered, but she managed to qualify for French law school. At 18, she left and headed to Panthéon-Sorbonne University, where she was one of over 3,000 first-year students. Compared to the intense social scrutiny of Duruy, the relative anonymity felt like a vacation. “I finally got to be just a face in the crowd,” Olivia said. “It was such a relief not to be in fight-or-flight mode all the time; I was finally able to think. That’s when I started developing the tools.”

Olivia had always been a fan of tools. When she was a kid, she would spend hours watching her father at his workbench. The room contained a letterpress and a device for slicing metal, but her father’s favorites were the woodworking tools. Olivia loved the way he could use them to change the nature of materials, altering the shape and feel of an object until it resembled something completely new. She remembers the smell of wood shavings filling her nostrils as he carved patterns into the wood. “That was always the place I wanted to go play,” she said.

Olivia, through the years

The memories came back to her in her first years of university, when the respite from bullying allowed her to reflect on the challenges she’d encountered socially. For most of her life, Olivia had felt lost when navigating social situations, while others seemed to have a built-in compass. She desperately wanted to find her way, but how? Raised by two academics, she looked for answers in behavioral science. “When you have parents who are a psychotherapist and a physical chemist, you assume there’s been research done about everything,” Olivia told me recently. “But academic studies are not presented as tools. They’re presented as complex tables and regressions. So it took a lot of time to get what the studies were saying. Unfortunately in my case, I didn’t have time. I was really desperate. I needed to figure this out for myself,”

Olivia’s mother wanted to help, so she handed her daughter a book, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. In place of graphs and tables, the book contained lessons like “Three fundamental techniques in handling people;” “The six ways to make people like you;” “The twelve ways to win people to your way of thinking.”

“My mother said she wasn’t sure if it would be useful since, to her, the book was full of no-brainers,” Olivia said. “She was like, ‘Geez, do people need to be told this?’ For me, though, it was a revelation.”

For the first time, Olivia realized there were actual human tools one could use to interact with others. She began to seek out other titles, and used them to build a social road map. It took some effort. Though self-help books were gaining popularity in the United States at the time, in France they were barely tolerated. Few people bought them, and those that did rarely admitted to it. But Olivia was hooked, and before long she had accumulated a small trove of social self-help books.

They weren’t all helpful. Several were outdated personality guides from the 1950s, a time when it was assumed that only the naturally charismatic became leaders. But a few stuck out, like one by Kate White, editor-in-chief at Cosmopolitan between 1998 and 2012, titled Why Good Girls Don’t Get Ahead … But Gutsy Girls Do. White listed “nine secrets every career woman must know” and urged ambitious young women to shed their self-effacing good-girl personas and “get some zip.” Olivia was struck by the methodical techniques that White advocated, including the idea that women should “toot their own horns” and seek out new challenges. Olivia started experimenting with her own behavior, adding updated tools of her own.

She had begun writing a recipe for reinvention.

THE IDEA THAT qualities like charisma or leadership can be taught is fairly new. Sixty years ago, science dictated that social skills were innate; somebody like Olivia would have been better off seeking a profession in which she could mostly avoid people.

Peter Cappelli is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school and an expert on human-resources development. He says that leadership training was first deemed necessary for success in the 1920s, when corporations like General Electric began to hire inexperienced workers straight from university. GE sent new employees on programs designed to fast-track them into tailored positions—some of the first executive-development schemes in the world. As with business-coaching tactics today, the methods were rooted in the latest scientific knowledge. But the psychology of the 1920s was rather different to today’s, in part because of the influence of Freud.

Freud believed there were three aspects to our personality and psyche: the id, ego and superego. The ego (conscious mind) and superego (conscience) could be shaped by society, but the id represented our biologically ingrained instincts and motives, from which we could not easily be freed. What’s more, Freud argued that much of our behavior stems directly from the id. To business thinkers, this meant that some people were psychologically predisposed for leadership, while others lacked the necessary hardwiring. Finding a company’s future executives, in other words, was a matter of correctly identifying a person’s knack for leadership.

At GE, promising new hires entered a one-year program, during which their leadership potential was assessed by both superiors and peers. The company also ran what would now be called an executive retreat—effectively, a test of employees’ ability to socialize. Lower-level managers and executives would spend a week in the summer camping on a company-owned island in Lake Ontario. One can see the appeal of the approach, or at least appreciate why it made sense at the time. But it imposed an artificial ceiling on those deemed to be lacking social skills. This was bad news for introverts.

Over the next few decades, however, businesses like GE began letting each section of the company develop its own leaders. Some executives pushed back against the separation of social and technical skills, and started considering engineers for management roles. Other companies made similar changes. A 1953 study found that one-third of large corporations were led by executives with engineering backgrounds. While this might have been meritocratic, it wasn’t always effective. According to Cappelli, the engineers were “frequently bewildered” by executive positions, which were fundamentally about overseeing people.

Different companies sought out different solutions. Some hired psychologists to act as consultants for newly minted managers. (Thomas Gordon’s Leader Effectiveness Training, which emphasized active listening and no-lose conflict resolution and was popular at the time, was later adapted into a popular parenting technique in the 1970s). Others, like Lockheed, sent a dozen or so trainees every year to Harvard Business School for the management equivalent of finishing school. Industrial-agriculture giant Monsanto set up an extensive interpersonal-skills training and coaching program specifically for its chemists and engineers. One company official described its graduates as “so brilliant, they annoy everyone.”

Yet, for all the emphasis on training, the 1950s recipe for management material had little to do with job performance. Evaluations continued to focus on social skills rather than educational achievement or technical ability. And with only a fuzzy understanding of the precursors to social success, top executives developed lists of must-have skills that became increasingly generalized. In 1957, The New York Times tackled the issue by publishing two lists of skills. One was drawn from a corporate personnel manual, the other from a kindergarten report card:

List A: Dependability; Stability; Imagination; Originality; Self-expression; Health and vitality; Ability to plan and control; Cooperation.

List B: Can be depended on; Contributes to the good work of others; Accepts and uses criticism; Thinks critically; Shows initiative; Plans work well; Physical resistance; Self-expression; Creative ability.

A successful executive in 1950s America, in short, was expected to have essentially the same skills as a well-behaved four-year-old. (B is the kindergarten list, by the way.) In the decades that followed, corporate hierarchies became inflated with executive deadweight as the personality tests proved a poor means of picking boardroom winners. Companies began to doubt whether it was worth trying to train talent internally when it could be poached from other companies. Human resources departments and executive-training programs dwindled.

By the time the dot-com boom took hold in the 1990s, driving demand for a new generation of managerial talent, companies had all but abandoned the goal of developing social skills in-house. Yet the idea that personality and success were entwined had not gone away. Coaches who might have taken company jobs were going direct to the masses instead. Stephen R. Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, published in 1989, would eventually sell 25 million copies. (A few years after it appeared, President Bill Clinton mused that American productivity would greatly increase if people adopted the habits.) A bronzed, square-jawed business guru named Tony Robbins made millions from motivational events and books like Awaken the Giant Within. By now, Freud had been largely forgotten, and personal progress was not just possible, it was easy—it was just that the responsibility for achieving it had shifted to the individual.

It was around this time that Olivia began to develop her own highly effective habits. Her timing, it turned out, was good. As she absorbed her collection of self-help books and began adding tools of her own, the corporate landscape was changing in a way that she would soon exploit. The tech boom had already propelled more engineer-minded people like herself to the top of multimillion-dollar businesses. Many were, in the language of Monsanto, brilliant enough to annoy others. Some were also intolerant of those less brilliant. According to The Wall Street Journal, Bill Gates once reacted to the opening of a presentation by a Microsoft employee with the remark, “There’s nothing about that slide I like.” A few moments later, he asked the presenter, “Why don’t you just give up your options and join the Peace Corps?”

This was the late 1990s, and Microsoft dominated the world of personal computing. Yet a demand for more holistic leaders was emerging. At Apple, where Steve Jobs was insisting that products be both functional and beautiful, executives were incorporating not just engineers and salespeople but also designers into their multidisciplinary teams. The company’s success meant the practice became ingrained in Silicon Valley business culture. “Apple changed the game,” said Kelli Richards, who served as the director of music and entertainment markets at Apple for most of the decade. “Apple put it out there that they wanted employees who are experts, yet who also have the capacity to work as part of a cross-functional team.”

Companies needed managers who were technical and charismatic. Geeks, yes, but not dorks. This is no longer a new idea. It isn’t enough any more just to be smart. You also have to be able to interact with people. And that is easier said than done. It is one thing to grasp the rationale for social skills, but to actually become more charismatic? That’s tough.

As Olivia finished her fourth year in law school, her transition was almost complete. True, she was still a bit of a bookworm; she was studying for a dual master’s degree in French and German business law, after all. But she was also teaching sailing lessons in the summers, performing with a comedy improv troupe that she had founded, and freelancing for Forbes magazine. She wasn’t just busy, she was social.

A photo from her 21st birthday party, in 2000, shows a group of costumed law students, some dressed as angels, others as devils. Olivia stands among them, her arms thrown around two young men holding plastic pitchforks. Her red-painted lips form a grin that matches the sparkly horns glued to her headband. A few years prior, her classmates wanted her kicked out of school. Now the awkward nerd was the center of the party.

Eventually, other people began to take notice of her transformation. After university, Olivia moved to New York to work as a freelance publicist. She would talk with journalists, and one reporter kept asking about the social tools she had developed. A short time later, a profile of Olivia appeared in the international edition of Le Figaro. The piece emphasized how she had created a set of personal leadership and communication tools. Soon Olivia was getting calls from executives. They wanted to know how she had transformed herself—and they wanted her to help them do the same.