cover image What's Your Corporate IQ?: How the Smartest Companies Learn, Transform, Lead

What's Your Corporate IQ?: How the Smartest Companies Learn, Transform, Lead

Jim Underwood. Kaplan Publishing, $22 (236pp) ISBN 978-0-7931-8573-3

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.