Siendo Exitosos En Una Empresa

Getting Smart About Smarts

In school, students focus on “subjects”- history, math, language, and so on. Similarly, we can identify the subjects of executive work and the distinct set of aptitudes that a manager must be able to demonstrate in each. All managerial work falls into one of three subjects: accomplishing tasks, working with and through others, and judging oneself and adapting one´sbehavior accordingly. (For a description of the research supporting these classifications, see the sidebar “Creating a Measure of Executive Intelligence”) Here´s how executive intelligence is manifest within these three subjects.
Accomplishing Tasks. In this subjec, intellident, executives make decisions using a set of six core cognitive skills. Among them are critically examinin underlyingassumptions and identifying probable unintended consequences. (Fort he full list of cognitive skills in each subject, see the exhibit “ The Skills That Make Up Executive Intelligence”) With these aptitudes in mind, consider the way two CEOs accomplished tasks in response to business crisis
In the 1980s, General Motors was losing market share to its more efficient Japanese competitors, and, at the sametime, it was struggling with terrible labor relations. ThenCEO Roger Smith developed a bold plan to solve both problema by replacing nearly all of GM’s manufacturing forcé with robotics. By the end of the 1980s, GM had spent more tan $45 billion on plant automation- a sum that at the time would have been enough to purchase both Toyota and Nissan. Yet its market share and plant productivitycontinued to decline every year following automation. To Smith, automation had seemed like such a logical move and, abviously, such high-risk initiatives are very difficult to undertake. But Smith demonstrated a severe lack of executive intelligence in his analysis. First, he failed to question his underlying assumption that more robots equals cheaper cars. A review of readily available data would haverevealed that machines entail huge capital expenses and call for highly skilled support teachnicians. Second, he falled to anticípate the unintended consequences of his initiative: Automation can severely limit a plant’s flexibility and, hence, its ability to change product lines. Had Smith more skillfully analyzed the situation, he might still have chosen to invest in automation, but he could havedone so in a way that maximized his chances for success. As Robert Lutz, a senior GM executive, later explained, the best answer to GM’s productivity problema was, in fact, a combination of peopleand machines that capitalized on the strengths of each.
By constrast, when D. Keith Grossman was hired as company was struggling to survive. Grossman was charged with helping the company profitablyproduce and market its flagship product, a ventricular assits device for recovery from open-heart surgery. But Grossman was quick to question the industry’s fundamental assumotion: that getting a successful product to market would result in a viable bussiness. Thoratec was competing with large, global companies that were focused not justo n single device but on whole diseases, combining drugs anddevices. What´s more, those firms had deep pockets to market to doctors and consumers.
Thoratec’s product-focused assumption had created an expensive unintended consequence: the need to build an infrastructure to produce and sell a single product, leading to a severe cost hándicap since the same infrastructure would be required regardless of how many products the company was selling. Thorateccould never hope to compete with companies offering vast and integrated product lines. To succeed, Grossman concluded, the company would have to gain scale, either by acquiring another company or by being acquired. Grossman had effectively anticipated key abstacles to achieving the company’s objectives and identified sensible means to circumvent them, another of the cognitive skills required in...