There is no doubt that a substantial proportion of people in prominent leadership positions in major corporations and other organisations are poorly suited to their jobs. This is partly the fault of consultants and the organisations themselves for choosing inappropriate candidates, and partly because it is so difficult to predict a person’s performance. But now these problems has been solved, at least according to the claims of Justin Menkes in his book Executive Intelligence.
Take the hard-to-define qualities which top executives need to be successful in their jobs, call them Executive Intelligence, and hey presto, you have discovered the missing ingredient to predicting executive success. Unfortunately I don’t share the author’s enthusiasm concerning his postulated “solution”, which presumably requires using his consulting services to ensure optimum assessment of executive candidates.
The book is better written, and thus more interesting to read, than most business books. Menkes defines Executive Intelligence as the cognitive skills that determine an individual’s aptitude in accomplishing tasks, working with and through other people, and assessing/adapting oneself. However, he fails to recognise some fatal flaws in his theories which can readily be discerned by the application of some of the critical analysis of underlying assumptions which he advocates. He incorrectly assumes that essentially the same set of skills is required for different executive positions in different organisations, and in particular he incorrectly assumes that the same skills are required for a leadership position as for a mangerial position. He assumes that an executive is someone who makes all the decisions, so that the executive needs to be the smartest person in the room; whereas in my view an organisation in which one person makes all the critical decisions is doomed to a limited existence, no matter how smart that person is.
Menkes is very critical of the limitations of Emotional Intelligence tests, but in my view proposes something far less valuable. The use of hypothetical questions with subjectively assessed responses has been a feature of job interviews for a long time. It is difficult to see how the author’s particular ways of generating hypothetical questions and subjectively assessing responses can be regarded as a “breakthrough”.