Are you so smart you’re dumb?

High intelligence is not always an indicator of good ability in business. 

I have had the honour of working with many seriously smart people, those with an IQ of 140 - 160 or more, and it is breathtaking to see how some genuinely work at a few levels above the rest of us. When it works well these people make CEO or found successful companies in short order. However, it often goes wrong and I know too many otherwise smart people who are unemployable or in jobs they resent.

While the following apply to all of us, here are a few of my observations for the smarter set (and Engineers with borderline Aspergers too):

1.  In the end it’s all about people. Relationships are important. The ability to persuade others as to the course of action to take is vital. Understanding company politics is important. Many intelligent analytical types see an obvious answer and then get frustrated when others don’t listen. You need to learn to take others on the journey. You need to learn people skills. If you work in engineering, finance or investment banking then I am speaking to you in particular.
2. Learn to stop justifying your decisions, and make the right decision. Too often smart people use their knowledge and verbosity to justify and defend their decisions. I come across this all the time. They put up a bulletproof case for the actions they have taken. This is simply using your intellect to paper over your deficiencies. Learn to take your medicine, and shut up sometimes. 
3. Understand that best practice needs to apply to the average employee, not the smartest. Procedures and processes to run a company should be based on the needs of the average employee. That which may take you a few hours using the latest statistical data science techniques could take days for the average person, if they can do it at all (not that they would be expected to in most cases). Make sure you understand the expectations on the performance of the average employee. 
4. A company can’t run on its smartest people alone. By employing a few smart people a startup company can do a lot in a short period of time. However, for a larger, more mature company smarter people are actually a risk because it is harder to replace them. What a smarter person brings to a company (in theory) is higher productivity and greater understanding of more areas of the business. Any role for that person is by definition tailored to their ability. However, people with a high IQ also tend to get dissatisfied or bored easily and move on to other roles or companies. In other words higher staff turnover and instability often go hand in hand with high IQ employees. 
5. Being rational is not always rational. This is vital to understand. Society and culture run by sets of rules that are not rational. These rules are based on our non-rational side – otherwise known as human nature. The Ten Commandments are rational when you take human nature into account, but are not rational to someone who uses Boolean logic. I often find high IQ people making the equivalent to what I call the drug addict’s excuse  – “I’m just borrowing it, I’ll return it later.”  Remember the old saying that we judge ourselves by our intent and we judge others by their actions. If you rationalise everything you do rather than considering how it appears to others then you are going to piss off a lot of people and be deemed untrustworthy. Learn to do the right thing, not the rational thing. 
6. Learn to accept dumb decisions. Management get paid to call the shots. They may not get them right all the time, but they are accountable for their actions. Once a decision is made, it is made. I see far too many smart people unable to let go of the option they put up which in their mind was better than the option taken. At worst this turns into poisonous rancour and a real “I told you so” attitude at the slightest thing that goes wrong – I also see it as a root cause of depression in some of my smartest friends. Please learn to accept defeat with grace and then back the current course of action, and improve it where you can. You will earn more respect that way than by complaining about how stupid people are.