Corporate IQ

I met a classmate from B-School a couple of days ago. He is the BU head of 2 Business Units at a large company and doing rather well. He mentioned something a board member was pondering over at a certain meeting."Why is it that companies seem to have such low IQs even when they are filled with people with exceptionally high IQs."

Fascinating. Perhaps even true.

I decided to do a little research and chanced upon this article. It suggests that strange things start to happen in corporate environments when at a certain point in time, output quality cannot be measured objectively. Beyond this point, personal goals cannot be fulfilled by purely improving one's competence. But people will still aspire to rise and competition must be decided on something else. That something else is often politics when objective competence matters less than subjective competence.

It is at this point, where the founders of the company need to put up a sign that says 'Slippery Slope Ahead".