Clever vs. Intelligent employee

What an intelligent person thinks today, a clever person thinks tomorrow.

Sometimes we tend to forget that there are major differences between being clever and being intelligent. Some companies, where CEO lost the grip over management to some extent, or if the CEO falls under same category, the Clever employees gets to be successful quicker than an intelligent employee, if you call that a success. Of course, you can call that a success from employee perspective, but how beneficial is that for the business, the society and at the end, the economy you belong to, that becomes the question. Quality of workforce is one of the major drivers for economic development of a country. The quality of workforce comes from working environment of an organization. A 'truly' productive working environment is the result of a healthy and fair leadership approach.

In critical condition it's the intelligent sectors that could bring in proper solution promptly as they have the know how. On the other hand, cleverness only helps an individual's success as opposed to the success of the team. When you grew up, if under good parents' supervision, then you may have heard it all the time from your parents to always maintain distance from clever kids, but keep close to the intelligent. There is a saying in Sanskrit which in English "a good company (companion) makes you a good person but a bad companion makes you bad".

If you exclude top 50 companies with highest employee satisfaction rate, which, in turn, are usually the best managed and profitable companies, in Canadian environment, employees in corporation are promoted usually through personal relationship. Some of these companies include major communications companies. Hence, all it takes is to get one of the under qualified personnel to go higher up and all that person's subordinates end up with the same poor qualifications down the line as law of natural selection.

My advice to CEOs is, be consistently careful of who you have in your top offices, one bad apple can corrupt the rest in no time beyond your knowledge and leaving you with expensive organizational repair.