Executive Intelligence

Does Executive Intelligence play a critical role in deciding the Organizations performance?

In his recent book, Executive Intelligence, Justin Menkes proposes another set of hypotheses, among them that too much emphasis has been given to personality and style and too little to types of intelligence that enhance leadership performance."When it comes to predicting work performance, cognitive-ability tests have been demonstrated to be approximately ten times as powerful as personality assessments. . . . Personality is not a differentiator of star talent. It is an individual's facility for clear thinking or intelligence that largely determines their leadership success."

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton cite studies that maintain that no more than 10 percent of the performance of an organization can be attributed to its leader as opposed to other forces.

Menkes claims that executive intelligence, as opposed to knowledge (which is more a matter of experience), can be developed through repeated solving of new, unfamiliar problems using information, both relevant and irrelevant, provided for the purpose.