Managing Leadership^®

What are those, exactly – geniuses? Are they just super-intelligent people? As we noted yesterday, there is a strong inclination to presume so. Indeed, it is common to rate smartness as ascending by degree from basic common sense, to intelligence, to genius.

But we’ve seen before that genius may not be all it’s cracked up to be. Or, at least, it might be more varied and less helpful, in some of its manifestations, than commonly thought.

It is possible to think of it as coming in three forms. Let’s take a quick look at them (and please do let us know what you think):

Savantic genius is not only completely out of your control – it may come at the cost of compromising other basic cognitive functioning. It can reveal itself in a variety of realms – mathematics, music, art, feats of memory – but may be expressed mechanically, without enlivening comprehension, even entirely independently of context or purpose. On top of that, the resources consumed to fuel it leave little to maintain other important abilities.

Socratic genius is partially out of your control. You don’t so much create it, as give shape to its expression through you. It is a sort of brilliant insight that blinds all who behold it, including you. You seem to have an uncanny grasp of certain matters – particularly those related to human experience, emotion, ambition – and can render and relate them with rare perception, and in a manner that strikes rich harmonic chords in the rest of us. A peculiar danger of this sort of genius is the assumption – shared by all, including you – that your genius is unbounded, extends to fields well beyond those where it is actually quite narrowly restricted, and that you both comprehend and control it.

Edisonian genius is completely under your control, if you have the endurance and discipline to keep it there. It arises from focus, sweat, and perseverance. You can’t call it forth more or less at will, and it doesn’t seize you suddenly, as the other types sometimes seem to do. Even the flash of insight identified with this form of genius is not its central characteristic, but rather is its end result, arriving at unpredictable times and in unexpected ways, while in the depths of concentrated, prolonged immersion in the matter at hand.

All three types of genius, though, can be compared to a loose cannon – you can never be sure if it will even go off, or if it does, what it will produce and in what direction it will project it. You can be sure, though, that while it’s careening wildly around the deck, it will have all of your attention.

Is that really what you want?

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Today’s tips: Speaking of out-of-context intelligence, please see this WSJ review of Matthew Stewart describing this problem in his new book, “The Management Myth.”

And here’s something else for your to-do list: a reading of Michael Wade’s to do list. My favorites: numbers 1 and 5. Yours?

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