Who cares about IQ? All you need now is a test of your IE — that’s inner entrepreneur

For top marks in business you need the skills to run your own show, says Phoebe Luckhurst 

At school, your IQ was the barometer of success. The intellectual elite swapped scores loudly, raising haughty eyebrows at their stubbornly average classmates and grandiosely circling those Gifted and Talent classes in their timetable with smelly, fluorescent gel pens. Those scoring low were dismissed as trolls — destined for an eternity behind the check-out at Maccy Ds. Children can be so cruel.

The workplace is like a (slightly more) mature playground, and for years it has been your IQ (or your educational qualifications) that determined professional success. According to figures published last summer, graduates earn on average £200,000 more over a lifetime than non-graduates, and a graduate who achieves a 2:1 earns £80,000 more over a lifetime than those who leave university with a rather unimpressive 2:2. Even those scoring “troll” on the IQ spectrum can understand the equation “smarts = megabucks”.

But according to two leading businesswomen the IQ as a measure of professional potential is outdated. As Sophie Cornish and Holly Tucker, co-founders of e-commerce company notonthehighstreet.com, argue in their book Shape Up Your Business, taking control of your career is about your IE: your inner entrepreneur.

Arguably, IE over IQ is a model seen in some of our most bombastic businessmen — for example, Richard Branson, who left the elite school Stowe at 16, or Lord Alan Sugar, who left school at the same age and sold car parts out of a van. But Sophie and Holly’s theory moves this on: you don’t need to be a literal entrepreneur, you just need to apply the entrepreneurial theories to your career.

“Not all entrepreneurs are running their own businesses,” the book observes, “it’s a mindset as much as anything. Entrepreneurs may work for someone else but it’s their attitude to themselves and the business that they’re in that sets them apart from the clock-watchers… Those at the top of fast-moving and ambitious businesses share a set of skills, an attitude and a confidence that got them there and keeps them there.”

Other qualities include self-knowledge (understanding what you are and are not good at), gravitating towards talented people, being confident and building on your own successes. Above all, those with a good IE are attuned to their own workplace personality and know how to use their skills; it’s one part pragmatism to two parts confidence.

“Self-knowledge will help as a motivator,” argue Cornish and Tucker, “so long as it’s supremely honest. For example, if you are a creative person and you get stuck in technical issues, then you will feel very low, even if you’ve done a good job.”

Interestingly — and encouragingly — the book is aimed unashamedly at women: Sophie and Holly think that developing IE could address the gender balance in the workplace.

Wake up and smell the gel pens: our future leaders don’t need Mensa to make megabucks.

Shape Up Your Business by Sophie Cornish and Holly Tucker (Simon & Schuster UK, £14.99) is out now.

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