Once an individual is given a taste of the gratification that comes from triumph, and the tools to bring it about, they will spend a lifetime in its ongoing pursuit.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

We frequently hear how essential it is for someone to think "outside the box," but what actually determines one's facility for doing so? In other words, what skills make someone a creative thinker? Typically, creative thinkers can view issues from multiple perspectives, define problems in several different ways, and anticipate likely obstacles. Someone's aptitude for these skills determines how well he or she will perform as a creative thinker.