In the very beginning, when I first envisaged this book, I hadn't initially thought about having a separate chapter on intelligence. But as time went ticking along and the book started to come together, I figured it would be clinically insane not to have a chapter on intelligence. So, here we are—a chapter on intelligence, and this of course is another quality that is vital for successful leadership. Sometimes you can have intelligent leaders do something unintelligent, but the simple fact remains that it is far unlikelier for an unintelligent leader to do something intelligent. Just by dint of pure luck, an unintelligent leader may do something intelligent, but it is rather unlikely in most situations. However, by the same yardstick, intelligence isn't always universal—there are times when one form of intelligence works better than another form of intelligence, and leaders often have to choose which kind of intelligence they need to rely on given a situation.

There is a plethora of types of intelligence, and a majority of them can be categorized into either cognitive intelligence or emotional intelligence types.

I will be focusing the discussion and explanation in this chapter around these two main categories of intelligence. In some ways, the conversation around intelligence parallels the conversation around the nature versus nurture element of leadership. There are some who believe that intelligence is something people are born with, while others believe that intelligence is something people can and do learn. I will argue that the truth (like most things in life) is somewhere in the middle. There are elements of intelligence that we are naturally gifted at, and there are elements of intelligence that we have to work at in order to improve. This chapter posed a wee bit of a struggle for me to be able to decide which dogs to write about here, as there are far too many breeds which I could talk about. Some of the intelligent breeds have already been discussed in preceding chapters (e.g., German Shepherds, Poodles, etc.), and it is my aim to discuss wholly unique breeds in every chapter. Else, we’d be running the risk of having the entire book focus on Otterhounds and Dachshunds, which would be jolly for those breed lovers, but not so jolly for other breed fanciers.