What differentiates a "star" executive from his or her peers? This is no idle question because experts like Peter Drucker, Jim Collins, and Jack Welch agree that great talent builds great companies. So, finding and assembling a critical mass of the very best people should be the first priority of every business. But how do you recognize a star? What distinguishes them? Over the years, we've heard vague answers such as, "they are people with sound judgment, business smarts, or business acumen."But what do any of these terms really tell us?

Based on eight years of research on intelligence tests and cognitive skills, Executive Intelligence reveals the set of aptitudes that all brilliant leaders share. Dr. Justin Menkes, a renowned leadership expert, verified these findings through hundreds of interviews with senior executives, including thirty of the most celebrated CEOs in the world. Menkes discovered that just as great mathematicians share an exceptional facility for skills such as computation and deductive reasoning, great managers also have a certain set of cognitive skills that are at the heart of business acumen.

Managerial work can be broken down into three subjects: accomplishing tasks, working with other people, and self-evaluation. Within each of these categories there are identifiable cognitive skills that determine how well an executive performs, such as:

TASKS -- the abilities to properly define a problem, identify the highest-priority issues, and assess both what is known and what needs to be known in order to render a sound decision.

OTHERS -- the abilities to recognize underlying agendas, understand multiple perspectives, and anticipate likely emotional reactions.

SELF -- the abilities to identify one's own mistakes, encourage and seek out constructive criticism, and adjust one's own behavior.

Though these cognitive skills play a profound role in determining a manager's success, they are not what most employers focus on when recruiting or promoting executives. Instead, nearly everyone fixates on personality type, style, or other irrelevant characteristics. This book seeks to refocus attention on what really determines leadership aptitude.

What star leaders do is not magic. Their accomplishments are made possible by specific, identifiable skills that can be measured -- and learned. With a clear understanding of Executive Intelligence, managers can develop a means to improve their own performance as well as identify and cultivate the critical mass of talent their organizations so desperately seek.

Leading with Questions : How Leaders Find the Right Solutions By Knowing What To Ask by Marquardt, Michael J.
Harvard Business Review on Leadership (Harvard Business Review Series) by Mintzberg, Henry

Do all great leaders have this?
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 this book. 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 do not 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".