Economists have been emphasizing in recent years that that while cognitive abilities of individuals certainly raise their education and earnings, many non-cognitive skills are often more significant. These skills include simple factors like finishing one's work on time, to more complicated ones like good judgments in making decision, or effectiveness at using talents of subordinates. Posner argues convincingly that non-cognitive talents may be of greater importance in determining success at top-level government leadership positions than analytical brilliance and other cognitive skills.
He provides several explanations for the mixed success of cognitively able persons at important government positions, including limited extensive governmental experience- although not applicable, for example, to either Donald Rumsfeld or Richard Cheney- their reluctance to rely on the experience and knowledge of underlings, and the difficulty of using systematic analysis to evaluate the uncertainties in major government decisions. The limited role of top analytical skills might explain why voters, as opposed to intellectuals, typically do not weight heavily the "IQ" of presidential candidates in choosing whom to vote for. The modest value of exceptional analytical skills should also imply that presidents would not place major emphasis on these skills when choosing their top cabinet officers and other high level appointees. Although as Posner indicates, some presidents have appointed brilliant men who failed at major positions, on the whole brilliance is not the most important characteristic that presidents use in choosing their top appointees.
Of course, government leadership positions are not unique in requiring a much more varied set of talents than cognitive analysis. Success at top business and academic administrative positions also depend on omplicated mixtures of different talents. Cognitive brilliance is often not essential, and sometimes is even a handicap, in determining success at these positions as well. Many of the most successful business leaders have not been brilliant at systematic analysis, and some cognitively highly able persons failed miserably. Posner mentions Lawrence Summers, who was highly successful both as an academic teacher and researcher, and as a U. S. Treasury official, but had major troubles as president of Harvard. Another example from the academy is George M. Beadle, a Nobel Prize winning biologist who was a rather mediocre president of the University of Chicago.
To be sure, that many persons with exceptional analytical abilities fail at top leadership positions in large organizations may largely reflect the fact that failure, or at least mediocrity, is more common than success among heads of large organizations, whether it be government, business, or academic institutions. I am confident of that claim with respect to universities, the organizations I know best, where inspired leadership has not been common. A major reason for this must surely be the great difficulty in predicting how men or women would perform when they get promoted within an organization, or when they move in a lateral way from one organization to another.
The skills, for example, to succeed as provost of a university involves an ability to deal effectively with professors, to evaluate recommendations for professorial promotions and outside appointments, and to handle related faculty matters. Many provosts use success at that position to become candidates for presidents of universities, but the talents required to succeed as president are quite different. Presidents have to raise money, deal with businessmen, foundations, and legislatures, appoint deans, and make other basic administrative and organizational decisions. How well someone performed as provost gives some but limited insight into how well they would perform at the different tasks required of a president. This is even truer when they become president at a university different from the ones where they were provost.