VIEW FROM THE GROUND FLOOR: On Saturday evening the man and I sat in front of the TV and (unintentionally) got caught up in the Anne Robinson-presented IQ test, which was meant to measure the intelligence of the nation. Obviously the nation concerned was Britain but I was up for a bit of back-door IQ testing courtesy of the BBC.
For those of you who had better things to do with your Saturday night than sit in front of the TV, the programme consisted of a set of questions in the standard IQ testing mode covering verbal reasoning, numeracy, logic, memory and other areas that, of course, I now forget.
People in the UK could take part interactively along with a studio audience divided into various sections of the community including blondes and builders. Actually it wasn't the best night for either me or the man to be doing an IQ test, since we'd manage to dispose of a certain number of brain cells in a bit of a spree the night before, which is why we were sitting in front of the TV on Saturday unable to move. However, it doesn't take much to get our competitive spirit going and we perked up enough to have a go at the questions and discover that, while Mensa won't be sending us gilt-edged invitations, the loss of the brain cells didn't do irreparable damage.
According to the test, though, the man is four points more intelligent than me, which is a bit of a blow. (But then I wasn't the one who put a red top in with the white T-shirts on the wash cycle that morning) Both of us remembered doing these tests back when we were first looking for jobs - and both of us remembered scoring much higher in them then too. Actually, the IQ test was so popular a way of testing recruits back in the late 1970s that almost every big employer administered one of some kind.
Given that my mother was anxious to get me out of the house and actually earning some money instead of just talking about it, I went out and bought myself a book called Test Your Own IQ in order to hone my mental skills. By the time I did the last test I'd managed to increase my IQ by about 30 points, though clearly I wasn't any more intelligent than when I started.
Which means that it's really all about familiarity with the tests themselves and getting used to thinking a certain way. Not that it did me much good in my application for Bank of Ireland, where the supervisor of the test told us that the company was looking for the cream of the cream and so we shouldn't be disappointed if we didn't make it.
This is the organisation whose life assurance company recently sent me their customer magazine in which the tie-breaker for their competition was to complete the sentence "it is important to keep my contact details up to date because" in less than 10 words. In one of the banks where I subsequently did find gainful employment (and which didn't administer IQ tests) the recruitment specialist told me that they liked employing people with engineering degrees since it showed a strong ability to reason. I thought that a business degree might have been more useful but it seems that she was right and I was wrong which is why I didn't end up in recruitment.
Recently, a report from Forbes indicated that of the 440 chief executives on their top 500 list, 38 per cent have an MBA. But the companies of chief executives with MBAs performed slightly worse than those with other types of degrees. And those of the 163 chief executives who had no advanced degree did the best.
The median total return of companies where the chief executives didn't have a degree was 16 per cent, while the MBA-led companies managed 15.2 per cent. And those led by someone with a law degree did worst - 13.9 per cent. They should stick with the court work, obviously. Graduates of Harvard returned a measly 10.6 per cent while those who'd put in the study at the University of Chicago managed 24 per cent.
Clearly the cachet of a Harvard qualification might look good on the CV but it doesn't necessarily mean that the shareholders should be impressed. Maybe they'd be better off with someone who knows how to get his (sorry, but it'll be a him) hands dirty on the factory floor as well as keeping an Armani suit in the corner office.
Maybe you just don't learn everything from the Become an Overpaid Chief Executive Officer course. Or perhaps you just need a decent brain to start with.
I'm quite conscious about keeping my brain in gear, especially since I started working from home because I don't have to switch into intelligent mode first thing every morning. While having a particular routine at home is worthwhile when you're out and about all the time, it can make you very complacent when you're not. So I try not to do the same thing in the same order every day, or I try to take a different route to or from places I might visit simply so I have to think about it a bit more. It sounds a bit silly but I find it works.
Naturally, I no longer drive around town before 10 in the morning and between the hours of five and seven in the evening if I can help it. So I was a bit horror-struck to realise that I was in Dame Street at 10 past five last Friday. I was afraid that my neural pathways would have forgotten how to drive in Dublin's commuter hell and I felt a frisson of tension as I looked at the set jaws all around me.
Decisiveness at the lights, getting into the right lane quickly enough and swearing loudly at the fool in the Merc who was blocking the yellow box at the junction were all part of the scene again. And then, at Amiens Street, I chilled out and allowed the red-faced bloke in the BMW to cut in front of me even though he was completely out of order. The man in the Lexus behind wasn't impressed at all but I didn't care. The lights ahead of us were red anyway. Nobody was going anywhere.
Was that showing intelligence or have I really lost it?
