I think there is an interesting corollary between intelligence and uselessness. Look at the evolution of a human throughout their lifecycle. All humans start very useless, and a large majority become reasonably intelligent. There are a few major milestones in typical cognitive development that Jean Piaget defined.
One of the first is the idea of "Object Permanence, " which means that the child understands an object still exists when they cannot see it. A baby can understand a ball exist when they see it, but their thinking is that it ceases to be when you take it away. This changes after about 1.5 years as the child learns to associate an idea with the ball rather than associate it with their sight.
My cat, however, fully understood the idea of object permanence after she was about four months old. She understood that food existed, even when she was not given food. She also (sometimes loudly) likes to remind me that food is behind particular doors and cabinets. In addition to knowing objects exist even when you cannot see them, she can run extremely fast and land on her feet (nearly) 100% of the time. Compare this with a human baby who might be able to crawl at a staggering .2 mph.
I initially thought that developmental speed might be affected by age. If you develop fast, you are prone to die sooner, but that is easily disproven by tortoises that live ~100 years and yet are set out on their own after a full minute of being alive.
Instead, I am starting to think that a significant contributor is the very fact that humans start so useless. Because we have fewer innate instincts, we have more capacity to learn from our surroundings. Because we know more from our surroundings, we can figure out how to best maximize our current situation rather than follow our instincts. This extra mental capacity kept developing over time, allowed us to "evolve faster", through efficient cognitive adaptation, and turned us into the creatures we are today.
This same thought process can be applied to the business world. Some folks have a predefined process that they are going to deploy no matter where they are working. If they do sales, they are going to do x, y and then z. But, someone who comes in without preconceived notions of what sales is, and instead thinks about what sales could be, might more efficiently come up with a process that is instead z, x, and then y.