The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business

by Patrick Lencioni

Here is another testament to the superiority of organizational health over intelligence. In my career as a consultant, I’ve worked with a number of great, healthy companies that were led by men and women who attended relatively modest colleges—people who would admit to being just a little above average in intellectual capacity. When those companies made wise decisions that set them apart from their competition, journalists and industry analysts incorrectly attributed their success to their intellectual prowess. The truth of the matter was that those companies weren’t smarter than their competitors; they simply tapped into the adequate intelligence they had and didn’t allow dysfunction, ego, and politics to get in the way. On the flip side, I’ve seen all too many companies whose leaders earned the best grades at the top universities, who possessed tremendous intellectual capacity and had extraordinary experience and industry knowledge, yet still managed to fail because they couldn’t tap into much of it. In almost every situation, it was politics, behavioral misalignment, and inconsistency that did them in, leading them to make what seemed in retrospect like obvious tactical and strategic mistakes. Journalists and analysts always seem perplexed by how those executives “could have been so dumb.” But again, they miss the point by attributing the bad decisions to intellectual deficiencies. They fail to see that the real deficiency, the one that makes it possible for smart peopl...