What's Your Corporate IQ?: How the Smartest Companies Learn, Transform, Lead
- Book Review,
by Jim Underwood
From Publishers Weekly
The Corporate IQ referenced in the title of this turgid management treatise has little to do with conventional notions of intelligence. It is consultant and business-school professor Underwood’s own ill-defined diagnostic methodology, which measures 17 dimensions of corporate behavior—including marketing, managers, corporate strategy, "internal technology applications," "quality and process," "innovation," "attitude toward change," "values" and "excellence rating"—and compares them with a "competitor index." He insists that Corporate IQ strongly correlates to profitability, but while he trumpets this kitchen sink of broad and squishy performance metrics as an analytical breakthrough, all it proves is that companies that do well in every conceivable aspect of their activities tend to…do well. The IQ mumbo-jumbo is mainly window-dressing for platitudes about valuing employees, customers and ethics and adapting to the competitive environment; these banalities are somewhat incongruently yoked to hackneyed New Economy conceits about capitalism’s "creative destruction" forcing companies to constantly reinvent themselves by shucking off their core businesses to latch on to the next big thing. The whole is murkily illustrated by vague case-studies of the "Ten Smartest Companies in America," including Southwest Airlines and Mary Kay Cosmetics, the subject of the author’s 2002 book, More Than a Pink Cadillac. Underwood’s hodge-podge of truisms and fads is interlaced with a garbled critique of other management truisms and fads, in which he embraces the buzz-concept of "complex dynamic systems" but disdains the buzz-concept of "complex adaptive systems." His disorganized, repetitive style, occasionally relieved by Creationist digressions ("Darwin himself recognized that there is no fossil record evidence to support the hypothesis that one species can become another"), may lead readers to reject any link between IQ and management theory.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
To uncover the reasons for corporate success is the driving force behind every business professor's research. Dozens of authors in the last decade, from best-selling Jim Collins in Good to Great (2001) to little-known Peter Burrows in Backfire (2003), have trumpeted their unique perspectives. Now Professor Underwood builds on the 1991 work of H. Igor Ansoff, spending time and thinking on crafting the 17 attributes of corporate IQ, then finding its top practitioners. The three IQ areas--strategy, organization, and character--sound suspiciously familiar; after all, how many times have the words "innovation," "excellence," and "value of people" been eulogized as those qualities endemic to business success? Yet Underwood, by dint of metrics and interview anecdotes and without benchmarking, explains exactly why the combination of these 17 traits makes up the best performers. Who are they? Some of the usual suspects, including Microsoft, Costco, and Fidelity. And some that are unexpected, including Kingston Technology, Zeus Electronics, and Luxottica Retail. Sections at the end detail the methodology behind this IQ. Barbara Jacobs
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
Based entirely on original research, What's Your Corporate IQ? is the first of its kind to describe the interrelationships between corporate strategy, CEO attributes, leadership, values, and ethics. In What's Your Corporate IQ?, Jim Underwood presents the results of a breakthrough study of 15 global competitors and determined that high-corporate-IQ companies consistently ranked among the top performers of their industries. Likewise, low-IQ companies ranked at the bottom of their industries. Just what is corporate IQ? Underwood describes it as the interrelationship between a firm's strategy, organization, character, and competitors. In a reader-friendly style, Underwood profiles the high IQs of the "ten smartest companies in America." Underwood states that organizations using a clear-cut "people philosophy"-one that focuses on the long-term success of its people-strengthens a company's overall foundation. While taking a humorous look at some of the self-defeating practices managers employ to sabotage themselves, he uses the situations to point out that leaders who commit to good strategy have definite advantages over their competition, and statistics confirm that reality. What's Your Corporate IQ? outlines:
* The 17 corporate attributes that drive corporate success.
* The foundation for corporate success-three rules of leadership and strategy.
* The power of significance building-an employee's basic desire to be recognized.
* Fifteen self-defeating habits of highly ineffective leaders.
* Measuring success on performance, not by financial quarters.
* Organization entrepreneurial support systems.
* Company character-values, people, ethics, and sustainability.
* Why initiatives for change fail or succeed on implementation.
About the Author
Jim Underwood’s previous work, More Than a Pink Cadillac, was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller that is currently studied by top business schools and corporations worldwide. A prolific author, he has penned numerous articles for national business publications and is in demand as a consultant and speaker for many Fortune 500 companies. Underwood is a professor in residence at Dallas Baptist University and has received numerous business and academic awards.
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