I was working with an extraordinarily successful company that was doing a CEO succession, and the board was discussing the threats to the business. They were enormous, despite the company's strong market position. I then realized that there were no longer just turn-around periods for companies in trouble, that now variables that could drastically effect any business's profitability were not going to go away.

Individuals with high executive intelligence cannot reach their potential unless surrounded by others with a similar level of skill. Without a concerted effort on the part of businesses to seek out those with exceptional decision-making abilities, the gap between who businesses actually need, and who they hire and promote, will remain wide.

Most people define "street smarts" as some innate ability to make savvy decisions, or one that has developed as a result of a person being confronted with very challenging circumstances in the past. I think another common term that is used is one who has amazing "business acumen." But, whatever we call it, it is always associated with some mysterious ability, only a few possess, that allow them to make better decisions than the rest of us.

There is a common misconception that intelligence is synonymous with IQ. "Intelligence Quotient" or IQ was originally built to predict the academic aptitude of schoolchildren, and is nothing more than a measure of the skills needed for academic success. Intelligence, however, is a much broader concept that encompasses a person's level of skill for any of a number of subjects.

We never ask candidates to demonstrate their skill. We ask lots of questions about past experience, but simply looking at the results of their decisions does not let us understand the process that they used to make the choice in the first place. A good analogy is sports. If you wanted to know how well a person plays basketball, for example, you could look at statistics like shooting percentage or blocked shots. But, this is just an historical account of how well the individual played in the past - the numbers do not tell us much about how that individual plays basketball now.

In the past there was not much social acceptance of men taking a primary care taking role at home. That has changed, and along with it, the opportunities for mothers to take on more demanding executive roles.

There are certain principles, all of which center around building systems and practices that teach workforces how to internalize and master these three attributes, that are realistic optimism, subservience to purpose, and finding order in chaos. Its important to note than one never fully masters them, the pursuit lasts a lifetime, but it is a very gratifying pursuit.