Justin Menkes Quotes

• What great executives do is not magic. Their performance is made possible by specific, identifiable skills.

  Justin Menkes

  Magic

  4 Copy quote

• Leadership means realizing potential-in yourself and in the people you lead.... The leader and followers cocreate their identities and performance.

  Justin Menkes

  Leadership, Mean, People

  Justin Menkes (2013). “Better Under Pressure: How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in Themselves and Others”, p.5, Harvard Business Press

  24 Copy quote

• CEOs must master three essential attributes, realistic optimism, subservience to purpose, and finding order in chaos. One's capacity in each determines their ability to cope with today's business environment.

  Justin Menkes

  Optimism, Purpose, Chaos

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• Executive Intelligence is about the specific skills one must have in order to succeed in senior leadership positions, i.e. the ability to evaluate underlying assumptions, recognize the likely emotional reactions of individuals, or sense a misstep and make appropriate adjustments.

  Justin Menkes

  Senior, Emotional, Succeed

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• Often people freeze under severe pressure, but that says nothing about their ultimate capability- only their level of preparation.

  Justin Menkes

  People, Preparation, Ultimate

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• The principles that make someone a master in the chief executive role deal with whether or not they can thrive in an environment of ongoing duress, and teach others how to do so.

  Justin Menkes

  Environment, Teach, Thrive

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• Business schools need to help students learn how to thrive under pressure. To understand themselves and their psychological vulnerability that might inhibit their ability to be effective in roles that involve ongoing complexity and duress. Preparation is essential.

  Justin Menkes

  School, Preparation, Helping

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• In the past there was not much social acceptance of men taking a primary care taking role at home. That has changed, and along with it, the opportunities for mothers to take on more demanding executive roles.

  Justin Menkes

  Mother, Home, Acceptance

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• The development and/or revelation of a CEO's potential for great leadership requires slow escalations of experiences that involve pressure, each time given the tools to succeed. Successful experience breeds confidence, as well as an eventual restlessness to try more.

  Justin Menkes

  Successful, Trying, Succeed

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• Knowledge is the accumulation of information whereas intelligence is one's ability to process information to render good decisions.

  Justin Menkes

  Decision, Ability, Good Decision

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• Only recently have we begun to understand the specific cognitive skills that contribute to business success and how to measure them. Hopefully, this insight will allow us to more keenly focus our attention on indentifying and cultivating decision-making abilities in the executive population.

  Justin Menkes

  Focus, Attention, Insight

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• There are certain principles, all of which center around building systems and practices that teach workforces how to internalize and master these three attributes, that are realistic optimism, subservience to purpose, and finding order in chaos. Its important to note than one never fully masters them, the pursuit lasts a lifetime, but it is a very gratifying pursuit.

  Justin Menkes

  Optimism, Important, Purpose

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• Those who have high business acumen display specific, identifiable cognitive skills that permit them to perform better than their peers. Once we understand that street smarts is skill-based, we can measure it, compare it, and improve it in the general population.

  Justin Menkes

  Smart, Compare

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• Research has shown that one's level of intelligence is the single most predictive component of professional success - better than any other ability, trait, or even job experience. Yet, too often, employees are selected because of their likeability, presence, or charisma.

  Justin Menkes

  Employee, Charisma, Ability

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• In a business setting, one's intelligence is crucial. Many problems faced by today's executives are unique and ill-defined. So, one's ability to analyze information and render a decision based upon the probability of success is imperative. What it comes down to is that all the knowledge in the world is useless if one has no means of processing and applying it. Organizations run on the brainpower of their people.

  Justin Menkes

  Running, Mean, Unique

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• Very little attention is paid to improving the decision-making skills of both individual executives and the organizational benchstrength as a whole. Often we find that this is overlooked because there is a common assumption the business executives have all the requisite cognitive skills they need when they come to work for the organization. The problem with that perspective is that it overlooks the fact that thinking skills can be learned and improved at any time during the course of a persons lifetime.

  Justin Menkes

  Thinking, Perspective, Attention

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• The central premise of great leadership is recognizes that fundamental fact, that not of us are fixed entities, and taking responsibility for making sure that we bring out our people's best selves.

  Justin Menkes

  Responsibility, Great Leader, Taking Responsibility

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• One of the capabilities, which seems to be the most difficult for aspiring leaders to maste is realistic optimism. It requires one to recognize that our experience of life is largely up to us, that our situations, good or bad, are largely due to our ability on a moment-to-moment basis to capitalize on opportunity. Those that approach life as if it is largely outside of their own control, or that others are largely to blame for their circumstances, generally find growth elusive.

  Justin Menkes

  Opportunity, Optimism, Leader

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• Once an individual is given a taste of the gratification that comes from triumph, and the tools to bring it about, they will spend a lifetime in its ongoing pursuit.

  Justin Menkes

  Lifetime, Individual, Gratification

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• We frequently hear how essential it is for someone to think "outside the box," but what actually determines one's facility for doing so? In other words, what skills make someone a creative thinker? Typically, creative thinkers can view issues from multiple perspectives, define problems in several different ways, and anticipate likely obstacles. Someone's aptitude for these skills determines how well he or she will perform as a creative thinker.

  Justin Menkes

  Thinking, Perspective, Creative

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• Most people define "street smarts" as some innate ability to make savvy decisions, or one that has developed as a result of a person being confronted with very challenging circumstances in the past. I think another common term that is used is one who has amazing "business acumen." But, whatever we call it, it is always associated with some mysterious ability, only a few possess, that allow them to make better decisions than the rest of us.

  Justin Menkes

  Smart, Thinking, Past

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• I was working with an extraordinarily successful company that was doing a CEO succession, and the board was discussing the threats to the business. They were enormous, despite the company's strong market position. I then realized that there were no longer just turn-around periods for companies in trouble, that now variables that could drastically effect any business's profitability were not going to go away.

  Justin Menkes

  Strong, Successful, Going Away

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• We never ask candidates to demonstrate their skill. We ask lots of questions about past experience, but simply looking at the results of their decisions does not let us understand the process that they used to make the choice in the first place. A good analogy is sports. If you wanted to know how well a person plays basketball, for example, you could look at statistics like shooting percentage or blocked shots. But, this is just an historical account of how well the individual played in the past - the numbers do not tell us much about how that individual plays basketball now.

  Justin Menkes

  Basketball, Sports, Past

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• The intelligence gap is essentially a shortage of executives with superior thinking skills who are needed by every business, as compared with the number of decision-making positions available.

  Justin Menkes

  Thinking

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

• There is a common misconception that intelligence is synonymous with IQ. "Intelligence Quotient" or IQ was originally built to predict the academic aptitude of schoolchildren, and is nothing more than a measure of the skills needed for academic success. Intelligence, however, is a much broader concept that encompasses a person's level of skill for any of a number of subjects.

  Justin Menkes

  Common, Academic, Misconception

  Source: bobmorris.biz

  4 Copy quote

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