The essay says that the idea behind importance of social and emotional skills is "incredibly obvious", but I would argue that when you are up to a certain level every good idea sounds obvious. Many economic ideas may sound obvious even for non-specialists (unlike that in, say, mathematics) and this is not just expressing this idea what makes the work of Heckman extremely important. Heckman and his co-authors created innovative econometric techniques to measure the importance of non-cognitive skills and derived important policy implications.

Heckman’s results allow calculating the efficiency of investments in early child education. The returns from such programs for children from disadvantaged families can exceed costs in about 10 times and this is not due to IQ change, but due to influencing non-cognitive skills
(see http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/01/11/catch_em_young.php )
Note that a standard way to evaluate a program to children is just to measure IQ (so, what is obvious for the author of the essay was not at all obvious for American educators and policy makers!). If you stick to this measure you would conclude that the programs for children are useless, but they are quite the opposite! These findings can change approaches to government social programs by shifting attention from the unemployed and older children to very small children which, according to Heckman, should greatly reduce inequality.