People Quotient (PQ) the new “third quotient” with IQ and EQ, represents how organizations successfully build and scale through people.
NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, February 10, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — High-performing organizations are quietly hemorrhaging enterprise value not from flawed strategy or execution gaps, but from unmeasured and unmanaged breakdowns in how they build, lead, and scale through people. A powerful new organizational metric, People Quotient (PQ), is gaining traction among proven leaders and boards as the essential third pillar alongside individual IQ and EQ.
In an era defined by rapid AI adoption, permanently distributed teams, fierce global talent competition, and relentless short-term performance pressure, forward-thinking organizations are awakening to a critical reality: traditional metrics of success are incomplete without a deliberate focus on organizational people capability. Enter People Quotient (PQ) defined as an organization’s disciplined, measurable capacity to attract, develop, align, retain, and scale high-performing people in service of long-term strategy. Unlike IQ (cognitive intelligence) or EQ (emotional intelligence), which assess individuals, PQ evaluates the system itself. Does the organization hire with rigor rather than reactively? Does it design roles and structures for clarity and leverage? Does leadership match the precise context, stage, and goals of the business? Are people decisions treated with the same analytical discipline applied to capital allocation, supply chains, or product roadmaps?
The absence of strong PQ manifests in patterns now painfully familiar across industries: strategic initiatives that launch with fanfare but stall in execution; leadership teams that cannot scale beyond the founder or current CEO; chronic key-talent turnover; meetings consumed by explaining lost momentum rather than driving progress; and a creeping organizational chaos that everyone feels but few can precisely diagnose or fix. These are not random failures—they are symptoms of low PQ.
“Companies have obsessed over quarterly earnings, operational KPIs, and financial modeling for decades, yet they routinely leave massive performance on the table because people systems remain accidental, reactive, and unmeasured,” notes the author of a widely discussed new article on the topic. “PQ changes that. It names what successful scalers have done intuitively for years hiring for raw capability over credentials, organizing for long-term clarity over short-term convenience, investing in repeatable systems instead of constant firefighting and makes it deliberate, measurable, and scalable. The organizations building PQ consciously today are compounding a competitive advantage that others will struggle to copy.”
The urgency is heightened by structural shifts that have eroded the informal supports organizations once took for granted. Artificial intelligence is not eliminating human roles wholesale; it is dramatically raising the bar for the humans who design, implement, govern, and adapt it making top-tier people capability more decisive than ever. Remote and hybrid work has dismantled the casual mentorship, cultural osmosis, and spontaneous knowledge-sharing that once compensated for weak formal people systems. Talent markets have turned hiring from a deliberate, long-cycle process into a high-stakes, speed-driven scramble—often at the expense of fit, potential, and long-term alignment. Short-termism driven by investor expectations, activist pressure, and economic volatility continues to defer or deprioritize the very people investments required for sustainable scaling.
When PQ is weak, the cascade is predictable and devastating: unclear strategic direction leads to myopic decisions; talented contributors disengage and depart first (seeking inspiration and coherence, not just compensation); remaining teams face burnout under rising capacity demands; retention collapses trigger revenue impact, reputational erosion, and brand dilution; and the organization enters a self-reinforcing talent-attraction death spiral Conversely, organizations that have achieved escape velocity often did so by unconsciously operating with high PQ: rigorous capability-based hiring, context-specific leadership matchmaking (rather than chasing abstract “great” leaders), systematic organizational design, and proactive investment in people infrastructure. Naming and measuring PQ transforms these intuitive practices into repeatable, compounding strengths.
The trajectory mirrors the rise of emotional intelligence (EQ) three decades ago. In the early 1990s, EQ was largely an academic concept from psychology. Daniel Goleman’s 1995 bestseller Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ brought it to public attention, and by the late 1990s and early 2000sfueled by Harvard Business Review articles, corporate training programs, and board-level discussions EQ had become a standard element in leadership development, hiring criteria, and performance reviews worldwide. Skepticism gave way to widespread acceptance once leaders saw the data: cognitive ability alone was insufficient for sustained success in complex, human-centered environments.
PQ is following a similar but accelerated path. The conversation is already active in private equity circles, among serial CEOs who have scaled multiple companies, and on boards that have watched otherwise sound strategies fail for preventable “people” reasons. These early movers are not yet broadcasting their approaches publicly; they are quietly building defensible advantage while competitors continue to bleed performance through blind spots they cannot name. The implications for adopting PQ are immediate and far-reaching. Organizations that elevate people systems to the same level of scrutiny as financials and strategy will see leadership capability assessed and matched to specific business context before crises emerge, hiring transformed from emergency response to repeatable high-confidence system, organizational design treated as a strategic lever rather than an afterthought, quantifiable recovery of performance currently lost to unmanaged people breakdown, and a sustainable culture capable of attracting and retaining the next generation of top talent in an increasingly competitive landscape.
PQ is not a program, certification, or passing trend. It is a fundamental organizational characteristic one that sits alongside financial health and strategic clarity as a core predictor of long-term outperformance. The full article, “The Rise of PQ: The Third Quotient And Why It Matters Now for Every Organization,” provides an in-depth exploration of these dynamics and serves as a call to action for leaders ready to move from accidental to deliberate people excellence.
Rohit Bassi is a private equity veteran. He is an investor, operator, and an organizational strategist who has spent decades building and scaling high-performance businesses. He has studied and supported leaders worldwide in operating high-growth companies. Drawing from patterns based on his own experience and those observed among proven operators in private equity, technology, and traditional industries, this work surfaces emerging systems that convert intuitive success into systematic, replicable advantage. For interviews, additional commentary, or the full article text, contact the media representative below.
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