PQ? No, it’s not an association test designed to recall your five-year-old memories of hesitantly chanting the alphabet.
It is an intelligence measure.
PQ = Political Quotient*
Since learning it two days ago, I’ve tried it on several MBA friends – to blank looks all round.
The acronym unravelled, however, and every face lit up with an ah-ha expression.
PQ, it seems, is deeply intuitive – and, along with better-known cousins I and E, completes an elegant troika.
Which might, I began to suggest as I explained it, be bundled into an MQ. Your Meta Quotient.
On reflection, though, I think MQ is rightly a quartet, not a trio.
Missing is SQ. Social Quotient.
To be a truly useful measure of intelligence today – in our connected, fast-changing and threatened world – MQ needs to encapsulate something more expansive; more socially constructive, even altruistic.
Quite a lot, a Google search reveals, has been written about Social Quotient**. But generally this relates to social skills – arguably subsets or extensions of your EQ and PQ***.
Instead, consider S as in social enterprise, or social entrepreneurs. As in the desire and ability to live, create and innovate so that your footprint leaves the planet and its inhabitants better off.
It’s the right thing to do. But it is not just about being good, feeling good, or nurturing good karma.
Take a corporate employer. The intelligence to see and effect solutions for making the world better off – and to understand why this is good for all involved – is a valuable asset in an employee: perhaps as valuable as being able to crunch numbers, read body language and occasionallly employ a few Machiavellian tactics.
Customers want it. Investors want it. Other employees want it.
Time for SEPIQ.
*Jo Owen, author of Power at Work, coined the clever expression.
**SQ is also sometimes used to refer to spiritual quotient.
***According to Owen, 'The reality is that power does not lie with the individual: it lies in the power of the system.