This is THE most important question you need to answer:

Your Corporate IQ is the total brain power of your organzation. It includes what people know and do every day. It also includes what they discover, learn from failure, learn from one another, share, innovate, tell each other and more. It all adds up to how smart your organization is today, and how well it will perform tomorrow, how the expected will be handled and, more importantly, how the unexpected will be met.

If your Corporate IQ is growing, you’re on the right track for the future. If it is shrinking, you have a problem. A serious problem.

A shrinking Corporate IQ is a function of many forces currently at work over which you have no real control. They include the following:

• Brains jumping out of the workforce – According to recent numbers from Yuki Noguchi in her article “Businesses Try To Stave Off Brain Drain As Boomers Retire.” “In the U.S., roughly 10,000 people reach retirement age every day. And though not everyone who turns 62 or 65 retires right away, enough do that some companies are trying to head off the problem…Losing veteran workers is a challenge, even for big companies like General Mills…But the older-worker brain drain is a big concern for industries like mining and health care.”
• Brains made BIG on the Internet – These days a single individual has the collected brainpower of the Internet and all the people connected to it which is acording to the latest figures that 3.7 billion or 40% of the planet. Just to give you an idea of what “exponential” means, the first billion was reached in 2005. So smarts are no longer hired and kept inside your corporate walls.
• Brains which are connected build virtual organizations – Smart people are everywhere on the planet today and they are finding one another and creating virtual organizations that pump out services and products at an amazing and (to those companies left in the dust) an alarming rate. Your competition many not yet have a brand or an office, but they are certainly as smart as you and may be smarter. And that means they are your competition and need to be accounted for when you look at the products and services you produce.
• Brains that are bored, tired, overworked, and not challenged – This is partly a result of the schoolplace model of learning being adopted whole cloth into the workplace. When we had time and world’s enough to design and develop and deliver training as if we were still in school it may have worked. Today, it is an icebox that needs to be replaced by a refrigerator.

On the other hand, a growing Corporate IQ is something you can manage. What helps the combined brainpower grow? That’s the topic of the next piece in this series, “It’s Time to Stop Pushing Learning.”