Once you've spent enough time in academia you stop associating hyper-specific knowledge or titles with intelligence in the common sense of the word.

I've seen some Professors and PhD candidates who are machines when it comes to research, but are completely unaware of basic social norms and are so stubborn they can become a liability.

The coach metaphor works really well : if you're an aviation nerd who excels at math but struggle with basic social tasks unless you're thrown in a drafting dungeon with a babysitter you're in all likelihood going to be a liability in an environment full of multidisciplinary teams.

I have a friend who's a normal guy and switched to comp-sci when he realized poli-sci wasn't his thing. He and a few friends had a business idea and began developing it to the point they had a prototype and were looking for investors : the initiative crashed and burned when two of the mega-nerds got into some spat over an ultimately unimportant technical issue and torpedoed the initiative.

Even in silicon valley you'll find that managers and executives tend to be more into the bullshit side than the technical side because a team of coding necromancers is worthless if they can't cooperate in a hierarchical structure or communicate their ideas and projects.