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.

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.

CEOs must master three essential attributes, realistic optimism, subservience to purpose, and finding order in chaos. One's capacity in each determines their ability to cope with today's business environment.

In a business setting, one's intelligence is crucial. Many problems faced by today's executives are unique and ill-defined. So, one's ability to analyze information and render a decision based upon the probability of success is imperative. What it comes down to is that all the knowledge in the world is useless if one has no means of processing and applying it. Organizations run on the brainpower of their people.

The intelligence gap is essentially a shortage of executives with superior thinking skills who are needed by every business, as compared with the number of decision-making positions available.

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.

Knowledge is the accumulation of information whereas intelligence is one's ability to process information to render good decisions.