Robert Jeffrey Sternberg, psychologist and psychometrician, is known for his research into human intelligence, creativity, thinking styles, learning disabilities and leadership. The theories he has proposed include a "triarchic theory" of successful intelligence and a "balance theory" of wisdom. He is a former IBM professor of psychology and education at Yale University and president of the American Psychological Association. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale and received a Ph.D. from Stanford. I have deeply admired his work and have often drawn from it. Here is a distillation of a conversation I recently had with him.

I asked Dr. Sternberg to discuss what he calls his "WICS" model for creating leaders. His remarks follow:

When you take a leadership role, whether as chairman of a corporation or as a leader in your family, you need ideas. You need creative skills and attitudes to come up with those ideas. You need analytical skills and attitudes to decide whether they are good ideas. You need practical skills and attitudes to put them into practice and to persuade people to listen to you. And finally you need wisdom to balance the effects of your ideas on yourself, others and institutions, in both the short and long term.

When we talk about creativity, we're talking about ideas that are novel, that are good and that are appropriate for the task you need to do. With creativity, with intelligence and with wisdom there's always a big decision. The big decision with creativity is to defy the crowd. It's to buy low and sell high in the world of ideas. A creative person is someone who decides to produce ideas, to support ideas that go against the crowd, and that is like buying low, doing the opposite of what other people are doing. Then you sell high. Once people are persuaded of the value of your idea, you sell it and move on to the next idea.

Successful intelligence is the ability to attain your goals in life within your sociocultural context by capitalizing on your strengths and correcting or compensating for your weaknesses, and by selecting and shaping your environments. It basically gives you your ability to do what you want to do in your life. Creative ability is coming up with ideas; analytical ability is seeing if they're good ideas; and practical ability is making them work. The big decision is just to use your intelligence to achieve success in your life by your own standards.