Strategic Intelligence

George Ambler’s discussion on “How Interruptions drain productivity” got me thinking about an article that appeared in the February 2002 edition of the Harvard Business Review. The article in question was Beware of the Business Manager*.  The authors stated that only about 10% of managers are purposeful.   The salient features of the article are illustrated below.

Now this always gets me thinking of why is that such the case. This is multi-dimensional problem with so many moving parts that it would be difficult isolate the root-cause. What I can state that there are management behavioral patterns that could lead to purposefulness and probably use case driven. For now I will ignore the use case or context and speak in generalities.

I can say in my 15+ years of work I’ve met about two leaders that fell in the purposeful quadrant.  Michael Maccoby’s book Narcissitic Leaders-who succeeds and who fails**, describes a concept of Strategic Intelligence (SI). Although the book was not written during my formative years, in hind-sight the two leaders in question possessed SI.
Strategic intelligence can be broken down into the following areas.

•    Foresight – leader has an end-state in mind and not afraid of aiming for lofty goals. Think Steve Jobs…
•    System Thinking – understand the moving parts
•    Visioning – frame and “sell” to the masses
•    Motivating – inspired to move toward the goal
•    Partnering – know their strengths and weakness. Can partner with those who will help them achieve their goal

Maccoby goes on describing elements of a productive narcissist and some of the attributes that resonated with me are summarized below.

•    Independent – free thought and allowed to operate in that mode
•    Reason – guided by reason
•    Enthusiasm – potentially inspire/mobilize people
•    Understanding – knows their stuff. Not superficial in knowledge.
•    Perseverance – does not give up (child-like and don’t accept can’t or no)
•    Sense of Humor-one could take potshots at them and they would laugh along
•    Voracious appetite for learning – always asking questions and seek understanding

So why are most managers distracted? I’ve sat in so many meetings where the measure of success was not present and the meeting hopped from one distraction to another. I suspect this mode of operation perpetuated by the organization’s culture–leaders.  Why else would this be allowed to continue as surely there cannot be a clearly defined end-state and result to march towards.  If there was an end-state in mind, then the visioning and motivation must have fell through the cracks.

If I could sum it up in one phrase-Lack of Understanding.  Many have lost the ability to think critically and have gotten intellectually lazy over the years. It is easier to hide in corporate process and engage in unproductive activity traps to avoid changing the status quo.  It takes courage and discipline to craft a vision and execute.

*   Bruch, Heike, and Sumantra Ghoshal. “Beware the busy manager.” Harvard Business Review 80.2 (Feb 2002)
** Michael Maccoby, Narcissistic Leaders (Who Succeeds and Who Fails) – Harvard Business School Press; (2007)

This entry was posted on 29. May 2009 at 17:16 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.