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.

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.

Very little attention is paid to improving the decision-making skills of both individual executives and the organizational benchstrength as a whole. Often we find that this is overlooked because there is a common assumption the business executives have all the requisite cognitive skills they need when they come to work for the organization. The problem with that perspective is that it overlooks the fact that thinking skills can be learned and improved at any time during the course of a persons lifetime.

Often people freeze under severe pressure, but that says nothing about their ultimate capability- only their level of preparation.

The central premise of great leadership is recognizes that fundamental fact, that not of us are fixed entities, and taking responsibility for making sure that we bring out our people's best selves.

Those who have high business acumen display specific, identifiable cognitive skills that permit them to perform better than their peers. Once we understand that street smarts is skill-based, we can measure it, compare it, and improve it in the general population.

We often say that someone has exceptional political or social savvy, but what specific cognitive skills allow these people to handle interpersonal situations so effectively? Typically, socially skilled people are exceptional at recognizing underlying agendas, anticipating the probable effects and likely unintended consequences of a chosen course of action. These specific capabilities determine one's "people smarts."