Research has shown that one's level of intelligence is the single most predictive component of professional success - better than any other ability, trait, or even job experience. Yet, too often, employees are selected because of their likeability, presence, or charisma.

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.

Business schools need to help students learn how to thrive under pressure. To understand themselves and their psychological vulnerability that might inhibit their ability to be effective in roles that involve ongoing complexity and duress. Preparation is essential.

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.

Executive Intelligence , and its evaluation are very must about one's ability to think under pressure. Given the evolution of global business, this is more important today, and it's going to stay that way.

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.

Executive Intelligence is about the specific skills one must have in order to succeed in senior leadership positions, i.e. the ability to evaluate underlying assumptions, recognize the likely emotional reactions of individuals, or sense a misstep and make appropriate adjustments.