Average intelligence person wins

I never tire of telling the story of Dean Eisenhower (no relative of President Eisenhower) of Harvard Business School, many years ago. He had a commencement meeting of the faculty with the Deans address where he spelt out his vision for the School and the expectations from the faculty. He then ended the talk with an appeal to these teachers. ’Take care of our outstanding students,’ he said ‘please nurture them. For, from among them will come the future faculty of Harvard.’ After a pause, he continued ‘And take greater care of the average students. Also nurture them. From among them, will come the future funding for Harvard.’

Dean Eisenhower was not wrong. The outstanding students would go out into the world, with their first class honours degrees and the Phi Beta Gamma labels – and expect that every corporate house, big or small will open their doors wide open and welcome them with a red carpet and fat pay packages and perks. And it does not happen. The corporate houses could not care less – or more, about first class honours qualifications. All they want is delivery of results – by employees who know their strengths and weaknesses, who are prepared to work hard and make sure that they are an asset to the company. They deliver.

While the case of average students is quite different from that of the toppers. And the first indication of their productivity is their attitude to getting a job. They try harder. They apply wider. Their expectations are lesser. They are more innovative. Their learning is faster because they have more enthusiasm. And they know how little they know. Their risk taking ability is higher; because they have nothing to lose in status or ego. They reach out for, and grab opportunities. They know they cannot wait for opportunities to come to them.

We all know about Bill Gates and how he dropped out of college, followed his own path, guided by his own star (if wealth is an index) and now has personal wealth of 55 billion US$ in 2007.

We also know about Steve Jobs and how he dropped out of college to start Apple; how he neglected studies in school because he was besotted with ‘design’ and spent all his time ‘designing.’ How he succeeded and built the huge Apple empire and then was fired from his own company and how he fell and rose again.

Closer home, I remember Sami who was working at Mumbai Airport as Traffic Assistant. One day a friend approached him to say that his company chairman-international was arriving and could he somehow manage to get the local managing director to receive and welcome him inside the ‘No Visitors allowed’ area? Pulling the right strings, Sami managed to do this. The managing director Whitby was very appreciative. When the group was leaving the airport, he told Sami to see him any time at the office, if he needed anything. A week later, Sami called Whitby and fixed an appointment. He told Whitby that he was fed up of the Traffic Assistant job and it was also a dead end. Was there anything he could do, with his pass class B.A. degree, in this large toiletries conglomerate? Sami was hired as regional sales manager for West India. Whitby felt that with his people skills and his gift of the gab, Sami would perform – and Sami did perform. He rose to general manager of a division before he left the company to become general manager of another company. Had he ignored the invitation to see Whitby and considered Whitby’s invitation merely as a social nicety, Sami would have perhaps been a Senior Traffic Assistant 15 years later!

Al Reis, the well known author in Marketing once wrote that ‘in the dairy, cream rises to the top. In daily life, it’s generally not true. It is mostly milk at the top of the corporate bottle. Intelligence is a two edged sword. Too little and you can’t cope with the corporate paper work. Too much and you are out of touch with reality.

You will find that top executives come from the middle of the IQ curve. Peter McColough, former Chairman of Xerox made the same point about his Harvard School class of 1949. ‘The record of accomplishment corresponds negatively with the standing of the class.’ The top people did not do that well. The one-third in the middle did. The guys who got the highest marks tended to be in the middle in accomplishment!