The most fascinating thing in the world is a mirror.

The GMAT is a surrogate of IQ because it measures analytic abilities. Getting in the 90th percentile positions you for a career platform that starts out at a very high level. But, everyone else on that career platform has similar cognitive aptitudes. There’s very little to distinguish you on an intellectual basis. The other aptitudes turn out to matter more for real-world success, because there was no selection pressure for them, and there’s more variation among your peers.

It’s not that I am so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.

Most organizations are good at collecting internally focused data, but few systematically provide insight about a company's external environment. For example, only 21 percent regularly track how their competitors are performing. Business is not an us-vs.-us exercise, yet management reports rarely touch on the world outside.

The dumbest people I know are those who know it all.

Emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger, and fear refer to feelings that signal information about relationships. For example, happiness signals harmonious relationships, whereas fear signals being threatened. Intelligence refers to the capacity to carry out abstract reasoning, recognize patterns, and compare and contrast. Emotional intelligence, then, refers to the capacity to understand and explain emotions, on the one hand, and of emotions to enhance thought, on the other.

Action without intelligence is a form of insanity, but intelligence without action is the greatest form of stupidity in the world.

IQ does not separate the star from the average performer. Every job has an IQ hurdle that people have to jump over, but whether you jump it and just barely clear it or whether you jump it and clear it by 30 extra points doesn't seem to make a difference. People get mistakenly fixated on IQ as a predictor of success. There is data that says that when you look at the whole IQ range from zero to 180, that the better the IQ, the better the performance, but that's because you are looking at a wide range of people. Once you get into a certain profession, that's where the theory falls apart. Within professions - where you are talking about people who already have at least average, and more than likely above average IQs to start with - then IQ seems not to play a role.

I think that most of our intelligence is based on pattern recognition. Human thinking is actually not very good at logical and analytical thinking. We are very good at recognizing patterns.

Information is not intelligence, and gathering information is not carrying out competitive intelligence. Many companies have mechanisms to accumulate large amounts of information; significantly fewer companies have mechanisms for conducting competitive intelligence.

Intelligence uses information as raw material, screening, sifting, sorting, verifying, analyzing, interpreting, and compiling it to create a useful output. And just as information is raw material for intelligence, intelligence is raw material for a higher-level process: decision-making

Every company has a well-defined competitive field of vision, which is usually too narrow. Long periods of equilibrium only exacerbate the problem. A whole raft of "minor little players" operates just at the periphery. They are difficult to see because traditional competitors focus on each other and not on new entrants and "nontraditional" entities lurking at the industry's fringes.

Intelligence becomes an asset when some useful order is created out of free flowing brain power-that is, when it is given coherent form (a mailing list, a database, an agenda for a meeting, a description of process); when it is captured in a way that allows it to be described, shared and exploited; and when it can be deployed to do something that could not be done if it remained scattered around like coins in a gutter.Â…An intellectual asset is a formally codified piece of knowledge.

... the test of a first class mind is the ability to hold two opposing views in the head at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Therefore those who do not know the plans of competitors cannot prepare alliances. Those who do not know the lay of the land cannot maneuver their forces. Those who do not use local guides cannot take advantage of the ground. The military of an effective rulership must know all these things.

The contour of the land is an aid to an army; sizing up opponents to determine victory, assessing dangers and distances, is the proper course of action for military leaders. Those who do battle knowing these will win, those who do battle without knowing these will lose.

To train ourselves in sagacity we should exercise our mental powers on those questions which have already been solved by others...

Cynicism is the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence.

Intelligence is what we use when we don't know what to do, when we have to grope rather than using a standard response.