IQ and Career Success

From the Book - A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age by Daniel Pink -

"Daniel Goldman, author of the groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence, has examined an array of academic studies that have attempted to measure how much IQ (which like the SAT, measures pure L-Directed Thinking prowess) accounts for career success.

What do you think these studies found? Grab a No. 2 pencil and take a guess.

According to the latest research, IQ accounts for what portion of career success?

a. 50 to 60 percent
b. 35 to 45 percent
c. 23 to 29 percent
d. 15 to 20 percent

The answer: between 4 and 10 percent. (Confining oneself only to the answers presented is a symptom of excessive L-Directed Thinking.) According to Goldman, IQ can influence the profession one enters. My IQ, for instance, is way too low for a career in astrophysics. But within a profession, mastery of L-Directed Thinking matters relatively little. More important are qualities that are tougher to quantify, the very kinds of high-concept and high-touch abilities I've been mentioning - imagination, joyfulness, and social dexterity. For instance, research by Goldman and the Hay Group has found that within organizations, the most effective leaders were funny (that is, funny ha-ha, not funny strange). These leaders had their charges laughing three times more often than their managerial counterparts....But where have you seen a standardized test that measures comedic aptitude?"