June 17, 2007
Intelligence and Leadership
Intelligence and Leadership-BECKER
Economists have been emphasizing in recent years that that while cognitive abilities of individuals certainly raise their education and earnings, many non-cognitive skills are often more significant. These skills include simple factors like finishing one's work on time, to more complicated ones like good judgments in making decision, or effectiveness at using talents of subordinates. Posner argues convincingly that non-cognitive talents may be of greater importance in determining success at top-level government leadership positions than analytical brilliance and other cognitive skills.
He provides several explanations for the mixed success of cognitively able persons at important government positions, including limited extensive governmental experience- although not applicable, for example, to either Donald Rumsfeld or Richard Cheney- their reluctance to rely on the experience and knowledge of underlings, and the difficulty of using systematic analysis to evaluate the uncertainties in major government decisions. The limited role of top analytical skills might explain why voters, as opposed to intellectuals, typically do not weight heavily the "IQ" of presidential candidates in choosing whom to vote for. The modest value of exceptional analytical skills should also imply that presidents would not place major emphasis on these skills when choosing their top cabinet officers and other high level appointees. Although as Posner indicates, some presidents have appointed brilliant men who failed at major positions, on the whole brilliance is not the most important characteristic that presidents use in choosing their top appointees.
Of course, government leadership positions are not unique in requiring a much more varied set of talents than cognitive analysis. Success at top business and academic administrative positions also depend on omplicated mixtures of different talents. Cognitive brilliance is often not essential, and sometimes is even a handicap, in determining success at these positions as well. Many of the most successful business leaders have not been brilliant at systematic analysis, and some cognitively highly able persons failed miserably. Posner mentions Lawrence Summers, who was highly successful both as an academic teacher and researcher, and as a U. S. Treasury official, but had major troubles as president of Harvard. Another example from the academy is George M. Beadle, a Nobel Prize winning biologist who was a rather mediocre president of the University of Chicago.
To be sure, that many persons with exceptional analytical abilities fail at top leadership positions in large organizations may largely reflect the fact that failure, or at least mediocrity, is more common than success among heads of large organizations, whether it be government, business, or academic institutions. I am confident of that claim with respect to universities, the organizations I know best, where inspired leadership has not been common. A major reason for this must surely be the great difficulty in predicting how men or women would perform when they get promoted within an organization, or when they move in a lateral way from one organization to another.
The skills, for example, to succeed as provost of a university involves an ability to deal effectively with professors, to evaluate recommendations for professorial promotions and outside appointments, and to handle related faculty matters. Many provosts use success at that position to become candidates for presidents of universities, but the talents required to succeed as president are quite different. Presidents have to raise money, deal with businessmen, foundations, and legislatures, appoint deans, and make other basic administrative and organizational decisions. How well someone performed as provost gives some but limited insight into how well they would perform at the different tasks required of a president. This is even truer when they become president at a university different from the ones where they were provost.
Intelligence and Leadership--Posner
IHere is a puzzle: effectiveness in senior leadership positions in government does not seem to be well correlated with intelligence. Washington was a better President than Jefferson, though less able intellectually. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan were not as bright as Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, or Bill Clinton. Lincoln, a brilliant lawyer, is an exception; Theodore Roosevelt perhaps another exception; and doubtless there are others. But overall the correlation between intelligence and effectiveness in the Presidency may actually be negative. Even more striking are the failures of Kennedy and Johnson's national security team in Vietnam and George W. Bush's national security team in Iraq. McNamara and his whiz kids (such as Daniel Ellsberg, Harold Brown, and Alan Enthoven), the Bundies, Walt Rostow, George Ball—these were extremely able people, many of them (like McNamara and McGeorge Bundy) truly brilliant. And Bush assembled an outstanding national security team--Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz, Rice, Tenet (appointed by Clinton but held over by Bush). Two members of the team--Cheney and Rumsfeld--were former secretaries of defense! And Powell was a former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
It could just be bad luck, but I think not. Economists distinguish between general and specific human capital, the first created by IQ and education and the second by training and experience in a particular job. A person who has a large amount of general human capital is likely to find a job in which that capital, augmented by on the job training and experience, is highly productive. The resulting success will make him an attractive candidate for a high-level government job. The high-level jobs are filled generally by lateral entries from quite different jobs, rather than by civil servants. Some of these high-level jobs are technical; an example is the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Board. Such jobs are relatively easy to fill with persons who can be predicted with reasonable confidence to do a good job.
But there is a tendency to exaggerate the versatility of the combined general-specific human capital that a lateral entrant brings to a high-level government job of a managerial or advisory rather than technical character. There are several characteristics of such a job that actually militate against the prospects for the success of an extremely intelligent person. First, these are "ensemble" jobs in the sense that many different skills or aptitudes are necessary to successful performance; if one of these, such as intelligence, is very highly developed, a person may neglect the others.
Second, it may not be possible to use step-by-step, logical reasoning to solve the problems laid at the feet of the occupant of a job like secretary of defense or secretary of state or national security adviser. Such questions as what to do in Vietnam or what to do in Iraq do not lend themselves to rigorous analysis because there is not enough information to analyze. Intelligence is not designed for coping with situations that are not complex, but rather are profoundly uncertain. Having great information-processing skills is not worth a lot if you have no reliable information.
Third, leaders or managers should be more intelligent than their followers or subordinates, but not too much more intelligent. If they are too much more intelligent, they will have difficulty assessing the capacities and limitations of their underlings and they will be tempted to substitute their intelligence for their underlings' knowledge. Analysis and knowledge are, to an extent, substitutes. You can multiply two numbers rapidly if you have good computational skills or if, though your computational skills are mediocre, you have memorized the multiplication table. Knowledge in government resides in civil servants, and they tend on average to be less intelligent (also of course less powerful) than brilliant laterals. So the latter are tempted to think that they can make decisions with minimal assistance from the civil servants.
The temptation is reinforced by a failure to distinguish between intuition and step-by-step reasoning. Cognitive psychologists explain that the human unconscious contains more information than we can access at a conscious level. As Herbert Simon (an economist and psychologist) explained, conscious attention is a severely limited faculty and must be carefully rationed. Through intuition, however, we can access the larger repository of unconscious information. Hence we speak of a person as having "experience" or "good judgment" or "common sense," as distinguished from being brilliant in the sense of being quick or having a good (conscious) memory. So now imagine a confrontation between a brilliant person who has no knowledge about Vietnam or Iraq, and a career State Department officer who has spent his whole career working on conditions in one of those countries, who knows the language, has lived there, and is steeped in the country's history, culture, and politics. Suppose he offers some advice to the brilliant senior official, and the latter asks him to explain and justify the advice. He may be unable to do so because he may be drawing on a repository of information below the conscious level. The brilliant official may be irritated at his inability to extract much more than a conclusion from the expert.
What is required at the top levels of government is not brilliance, but managerial skill, which is a different thing, and includes knowing when to defer to the superior knowledge of a more experienced but less mentally agile subordinate. Moreover, so specialized is management as a job that success in managing a business may not translate at all into success in managing a government agency. The firm-specific human capital that a person acquired in a career of management in a business firm may have no value for the management of a government agency, or for that matter a university, a private foundation, or an international organization. Indeed, an experienced manager of a firm may falter and have to be fired if a change in the firm's environment requires a different type of management skill.
A striking example of the specialized character of leadership human capital is Larry Summers. A truly brilliant person and successful secretary of the treasury, he failed as president of Harvard University though he seemed to many people (myself included) to be an outstanding choice. I have the highest personal and professional regard for Summers and blame the failure of his presidency not on him but on the Harvard faculty of arts and sciences. But the fact is that he failed, because he was not able to port his very considerable suite of intellectual and managerial assets to the management of an organization critically different from the Treasury Department.