From all accounts, it appears that it is going to become more and more difficult in the future to stay ahead of your competition if your team is not the best and the brightest in your industry. Intellectual horsepower includes not only IQ (many people believe that an IQ of 130 is needed today to be a top player) but includes transferable skills, the ability to understand and break a complex situation into logical steps and being super sharp, agile and a quick study. Intellectual horsepower also includes being able to embrace paradox and ambiguity and being adept at functioning effectively in the midst of opposing ideas or forces.

If you go back and consider the blog post Is Your Company Truly Designed for Innovation and the topic of mapping the job the customer needs to get done, you will be able to identify the skill deficits in your organization. Each time a customer voices a success, ask yourself “Who worked with this client, and what skills were at play to make this customer experience outstanding?” On the same note, if a customer’s job is not getting done, it’s time to step back and ask “What skills are missing from this process that we need in place?” From there, you can provide your team with the training and development needed to create outstanding customer experiences. Once you have trained your employees, if you have someone on your team who just doesn’t “get it”, then it’s time to replace that player with someone who can “get it” and get it quickly.

I also recommend looking closely at Executive Intelligence. This article from HBS spells this out nicely.

“Roughly a third of young Americans would give a “great deal of consideration” to entering government service if asked by their parents, a teacher or — surprisingly — the next president of the United States, according to a Gallup survey.”

Not Asked What They Can Do for Their Country by Stephen Barr, columnist for the Washington Post brings up a study by Gallup which points to the belief that millennials would be more likely to enter government service if asked by our Commander in Chief.

Interesting read.

Had a good meeting with our RDP ers last week. Just to refresh your memory, RDPers are employees who are in the first year at Intuit and are in a special program which exposes them to different parts of the company.  In talking to them, I wondered if we are looking at Gen Y in the right way. I often sit in meetings at Fortune 500 companies, where everyone looks at the youngest person in the group and says ‘Your a GenYer, so how do you guys think about this new world.’ When I asked the RDPers thought about this, they said that it was similar to asking an Asian person about Chinese buying habits. Even if that person isn’t Chinese. I thought that was a good point. I also was intrigued how they felt as if they do not use Web 2.0 technologies as much as their younger siblings in high school. The RDP also made another good point. One of them told me that during the freshman year in college having 400 friends on FaceBook was considered a good number, but during his sophomore year, having 1000 friends was considered good, but now high school students have over 2000 friends. There must be a good name for this exponential growth. The Friend Factor?