Smarts: Are We Hardwired for Success?

A football coach wouldn't move a great lineman to wide receiver and then wonder why he didn't perform well in the new role. Yet we to do this often in the business world. Smarts will help you better assess the abilities of yourself and others so employees will be "playing the positions" that make the most of their talents. By enhancing the chances for individual success you will drive the best results in your organization. You would be smart to read "Smarts". -- David Blackwell, Vice President and CFO, Wal-Mart Global Procurement

As a professional, I found the Executive Profile to be a fantastic tool for determining my personal strengths and style. The sections describing how your key strengths and weaknesses combine to create unique opportunities and challenges was fabulous; almost all the books I've read deal with one or the other, but not both and certainly not the synergy between one's strengths and weaknesses. If you liked "Now, Discover Your Strengths", then "Smarts" is a great combo of focus on strengths combined with weakness mitigation.

Chuck Martin has taken the insights he has accumulated from the ongoing executive panel of his NFI Research efforts and has created an insightful, practical Executive Skills Guidebook. Identifying twelve "built-in" specific brain (cognitive) functions which he labels as "Executive Skills", the book in a clear and concise fashion provides readers / users a very useful tool to assess their own strengths and weaknesses of each function. The book goes on to provide guidance and a map on how to maximize one's strengths and minimize one's weaknesses, as well as how to consider positions that intensify and reward the strengths. Throughout, the authors reinforce their findings and guidance with practical quotes from a wide array of executives, the commentary gathered from the 2000 senior executives and managers globally that have participated in NFI Research during the past eight years. Using the book in an internal organization seminar format would provide considerable strenghtening of a management team.

Great book, and easy read. We all know we have certain predispositions and this book explains them in a structured way so we can maximize the strong Executive Skills and contain the weak skills. It offers a new way to think about tasks and teaming, how to match skills to tasks and teaming of people performing those tasks.

Like other experiences in this mind business, Chuck Martin has supplied us with the evidence to support the gut instincts we all use to navigate our daily lives. I am glad that the book does not simply present the problem. It goes on to acknowledge the difficulty in correcting executive behaviors and then provides concrete ways for both self-correction and to assist others in maximizing their strengths and controlling their weaknesses. One of the quotes he used included the phrase, "rises to the level of their incompetence." We have all watched this happen and lamented the bad fortune of someone caught in this trap. What you realize is that the blame is not always the failure of the individual but a failure to recognize a good fit from a bad one. One of the most glaring examples that reinforces everything this book has to say is the problem most companies face when they advance top performers into management. I know my own company fights the problem that some top performers don't manage as much as they continue trying to contribute doing what they do best. Through promotion you can turn your top performer into your greatest problem or your most depressed employee. It is easy to think of this as a failure for the employee. It is really a failure to look more closely at the fit between employee strengths and the requirements of the job. I have often lamented that there is a diminishing level of craftsmanship in our world. Here is a new opportunity for craftsmanship -- fitting job requirements to the person rather than shaping the person to fit the job. Martin has offered these new craftsmen a powerful set of tools, background information and realistic examples that will help them maximize their business skills and knowledge. Crafting this proper fit between jobs and people will create the competitive advantage of the 21st Century and improve the outlook of employees in the process. This is really the most on-target work I have read in the area of performance management and human behavior. As a training professional, I will be more sensitive to the limits of training as a solution when the real problem be crossed wires.