The Four Intelligences of the Business Mind: Book Review

The Four Intelligences of the Business Mind: How to Rewire Your Brain and Your Business for Success, by Valeh Nazemoff (CA Technologies, 2014), reviewed by Shel Horowitz, primary author, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green

According to the Nazemoff, any successful business needs to concentrate on four different types of intelligence.

The first is financial intelligence, which most people already think about when they think about business.

But we also have to think about customer intelligence, data intelligence, mastermind intelligence. Mastermind is really what we normally think of as brainstorming. It’s the idea that a group of people can be smarter than any one individual.

In data intelligence, she suggests marrying the “9 Cs”—Collaborate, Consolidate, Communicate, Collect, Connect, Coordinate, Change, Converse, and Convert—to the classic 5Ws and an H that every beginning journalist learns to ask: Who, What, Where, When, Why, How.

Combining these, we get what she calls neuro-economics. And sometimes, small incremental changes that create a big result.

To me, the most interesting chapter was on customer intelligence. She talks about how to develop a customer profile, personas, and markets. and how to use this information to create communities. But she also shed some fascinating light on data. Specifically, the importance of determining whether your data is good. And I love her statement that success is not about how much data you have, but whether you have the right data.

These intelligences have implications in decision-making; Nazemoff talks about using them to determine who is responsible to make the decision, who is accountable, who gets consulted, and who simply gets informed.