Viewing this from my personal perspective as a business manager, I could not help but note the immense surface overlap between SI’s description of successful intelligence and many of the underlying principles ascribed to high-performance organizations. Here, for example, are statements (bolded in the SI text) from the discussion of Problem Solving:
| “Successfully intelligent people don’t wait for problems to hit them over the head. They recognize their existence before they get out of hand and begin the process of solving them.“(p. 158)
“Successfully intelligent people define problems correctly and thereby solve those problems that really confront them, rather than extraneous ones. In this way, the same problems don’t keep coming back into their lives. They also make the effort to decide which problems are worth solving, in the first place, and which aren’t.” (p. 160-161) “Successfully intelligent people carefully formulate strategies for problem solving. In particular, they focus on long-range planning rather than rushing in and then later having to rethink their strategies.” (p. 163) “Successfully intelligent people represent information about a problem as accurately as possible, with a focus on how they can use that information effectively.” (p.165) “Successfully intelligent people think carefully about allocating resources, for both the short term and the long term. They consider the risk-reward ratios and then choose allocations that they believe will maximize their return.” (p. 169) “Successfully intelligent people do not always make the correct decisions, but they monitor and evaluate their decisions and then correct their errors as they discover them.” (p. 170-171) |
Now, if you substitute the words “successful companies” or “successful organizations” for “successfully intelligent people, you will get a set of useful statements about high-performance organizations. Hmmmm…