Author Paul G. Stoltz, Ph.D., says individual AQs explain why some people, no matter what their intelligence or educational or social background, succeed where others fail. It's been used in workshops for Olympic athletes and at companies including Deloitte & Touche, Minnesota Power, and U.S. West. Defined as the measure of one's resilience and ability to persevere in the face of constant change, stress, and difficulty, AQ is touted as "the most important factor in achieving success." Stoltz also calls it an indicator of one's general ambitiousness, creativity, happiness, energy, and physical and emotional health; he therefore recommends that business executives use the book's guidelines to pinpoint top performers in the workplace.
While the book is filled with acronyms and buzzwords (LEAD, "unconscious incompetence," ARP, and CO2RE among them), the book's tests--reminiscent of Myers-Briggs questionnaires--are fun to take and easy to analyze. Stoltz has given the tests to nearly 8,000 people, so he obviously knows what he's talking about here. He offers specific advice on how to cultivate AQ in employees, and, perhaps even more useful, 22 ways to crush the AQs of your followers. (One of them, "Be consistently inconsistent," could explain many "Dilbert" strips!)
While Stoltz derives many of his ideas from psychologist Abraham Maslow, psychologist and Learned Optimism author Martin Seligman, and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People writer Stephen R. Covey, he gives credit where it's due, and he's done an outstanding job of synthesizing various classic and contemporary theories into one solidly inspirational book.