From Smart to Wise

Acting and Leading with Wisdom

Prasad Kaipa, Navi Radjou

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118296202
• eBook ISBN: 9781118331859
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

A fresh and timely approach to nurturing wise, resilient, and flexible leadership in a world of growing complexity

Leaders tend to obstinately stick to the leadership style that brought them most success in the past, usually one of two extreme styles: functional leadership that focuses on operational excellence or smart leadership that focuses on growth. When a leader's focus is too functional, the organization becomes introverted and can focus too much on bottom-line profitability while missing out on top-line growth opportunities. But when leaders focus too much on smart leadership, the organization may experience quick growth but lose its effectiveness quickly.

From Smart to Wise offers a new approach that balances the two styles to achieve a form of wise leadership that is both functional and smart. Drawing on inspiring real-life stories of historical and contemporary wise leaders such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and even Mahatma Gandhi, the authors identify six characteristics of wise leaders and offer a practical framework to help readers develop their own style of wise leadership.

• A timely and innovative approach to leadership
• Written by noted speakers who conduct dozens of keynote speeches and workshops, training thousands of people annually

CHAPTER ONE

Wise Leaders Wanted

We’ll start with a truism: in business, you need to be smart. In fact, smartness—whether it’s called cleverness, practical intelligence, or savvy—is the operating currency of twenty-first-century organizational culture. The leaders the world admires are tremendously smart, whether they’re in business—like Bill Gates of Microsoft, Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo, Tim Cook of Apple, and Ursula Burns of Xerox—or in politics—like U.S. presidents Obama and Clinton and former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.

What all very smart leaders have in common is an ability to impress us with their intellectual prowess and ability to succeed at very high levels. They see patterns in seemingly random information. They take decisive action while others are still trying to understand or appreciate the situation. They seize opportunities that many regard as too risky and show an ability to make strategic choices that confer them a competitive edge. Some are big picture thinkers; some excel at executing strategies and others at innovating breakthrough products.

All this considered, it seems desirable to be a smart leader, and it is. When we exercise our smarts, we not only experience success; we also feel strong and capable, operating at the top of our game. We want more of this good thing. If we are in the position of leading an organization, we want to leverage our smartness to succeed and help others succeed.

But these are complex and uncertain times, and many leaders are discovering that smartness alone is insufficient to achieve both success and a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment. Smartness and more smartness is increasingly failing to bring meaningful growth and prosperity to organizations and their leaders. In our experience, wise leadership succeeds where smart leadership cannot.

Thus, this book is not about moving you from smart leadership to smarter leadership, but about setting a trajectory toward wise leadership—an expanded capacity to act and lead wisely (without losing your smartness). It’s about what potentiates your wise leadership and what it is that wise leaders do differently. At its core it is an exploration of practical wisdom—how reflective actions, thoughtful application of smartness, and the deployment of enlightened self-interest allow you to become successful in a sustainable way while making a difference to others along the way. And it contains a road map and personalized tools for you to make the journey.

The Pitfalls of Smart Leadership

Smart leaders are an eclectic bunch that includes brilliant strategists and functional experts as well as superefficient tacticians and gifted managers of people. They may be start-up entrepreneurs or high up in the ranks of large, global corporations. They can be quite diverse when it comes to their perspectives, actions, and motivations.

For the purposes of this book, we’ll divide smart leaders into two broad categories according to their primary area of strength, which we refer to as functional smart and business smart. To generalize, functional smart leaders excel in one field or function, such as R&D or operations, and tend to dig deep to establish their expertise in the domain that they have chosen. Effective execution is their forte. They tend to be cautious in risk taking, think carefully before they act, and when they act, they tend to stick to what they know best. Whereas functional smart leaders go deep, business smart leaders go broad. They tend to be big picture thinkers who are risk takers at heart. They are prone to taking action quickly and generally have a competitive temperament. (You might not identify yourself strongly with either category at first, but as you read further, keep looking for patterns of behaviors that match yours.)

We’ll discuss these differences more in depth later in this chapter, and we’ll also examine a quality nearly every smart leader we’ve met or studied has in common: a powerful and ever-increasing tendency to play to their own strengths. As they succeed and move up, smart leaders tend to become increasingly attached to their particular type of smartness and show themselves less able to exhibit or appreciate the other type of smartness. This makes sense: most people build their skills and expertise on their existing strengths and temperaments; success breeds success. But this consolidation can exact costs—personal, professional, and organizational—that the otherwise very smart leader doesn’t see coming.

We’ll talk about this peculiar kind of blindness shortly, but first we turn to an example of an exception to the rule: a leader whose actions over time have shown an evolution from a highly consolidated style of smartness into wisdom.

Bill Gates is an exemplar of the kind of smart leader we call “business smart.” Gates was only twenty years old when he cofounded Microsoft with Paul Allen. Despite his unassuming appearance and apparent shyness, Gates, a Harvard dropout, was a determined and ambitious businessman who used every opportunity to outsmart the competition with great strategic moves that helped Microsoft reach a market capitalization of over $616 billion in December 1999.¹

That supremacy took a blow in May 1998 when the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit against Microsoft, accusing the company of abusing its alleged monopoly power on Intel-based personal computers in its handling of operating system and Web browser sales. A number of European countries followed with similar lawsuits. All of a sudden, a company and a business leader who were riding high faced a formidable threat.

Gates appeared by video at Microsoft’s antitrust trial, a decision that was widely interpreted as a snub to the Department of Justice. Under questioning, he appeared combative and defensive. He told the media that the lead government attorney was “out to destroy Microsoft.” When the deposition was read in court, Gates’s condescending attitude toward his accusers and the legal system in general stood out. According to CNN, that testimony helped turn public opinion against Microsoft and Gates. Microsoft settled the case in 2001, but in the aftermath of the lawsuit, Microsoft lost its momentum in the marketplace. Its market capitalization dropped from $616 billion in 1999 to about $260 billion in 2012.

While Microsoft was contending with scaling back its operations, Gates made a major course correction in his life journey. In early 2000, while awaiting the court decision, he stepped down as Microsoft’s chief executive to focus on his passion for software, becoming the company’s chief software architect and chairman of the board. Being a great strategist, Gates probably realized that it would be better to have a different CEO representing Microsoft to the outside world. In the same year, he and his wife established the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; by 2008, Gates had completed his transition to foundation and philanthropic activities (he remains the nonexecutive chairman of Microsoft).

As cochair of the Gates Foundation, Gates has awarded billions of dollars in grants to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs. While some people initially accused Gates of using his charitable activities to sugarcoat his image, his foundation is respected and appreciated for its compassionate and highly effective approaches to combating global problems ranging from infectious diseases to lack of education. Gates, the successful but polarizing figure for his ultracompetitive strategy, has become a more righteous and moral figure in the eyes of many people.

From what we can understand through observation and a study of his career, Gates’s actions in his business and personal life suggest that he evolved from a smart leader to a wise one. He moved beyond his corporate role at Microsoft and explored how he could use his wealth, smarts, and leadership skills to contribute to the common good. We see this as a reflection of how Gates shifted his perspective and broadened his approach beyond building a business empire to solving big problems facing the global community.

We have never discussed this book with Gates, and our view of him as a leader who broadened his approach from smartness to wisdom is based on inference. But our analysis of his actions suggests that Gates managed to transcend his particular style of smartness (in which he had remained fixed for a long time) by shifting his perspective, an ability that this book is designed to foster.

The Functional Smart Leader and the Business Smart Leader

We all tend to have a perspective on life that is relatively narrow, shaped by our predispositions, assumptions, and experiences. Psychologists call this phenomenon our perceptual filter—think of it as a pair of tinted glasses—and describe the ways it conditions how we organize and interpret the meaning of everything we experience in our environment.² The longer you wear your perceptual filter without challenging it or finding a vantage point outside it, the more you tend to get attached to your limited perspective. Worse, you end up seeing only what you want to see and rarely observe anything that is outside your zone of interest. You develop a well-worn autopilot mode and, unknowingly, a tunnel vision: you see only a limited portion of the whole spectrum of smart leadership possibilities and positive human endeavor.

Generally business smart leaders, many of them known for their intensity and risk taking, tend to perceive the world through a set of filters that for ease of identification we’ll call “red.” Business smart leaders thus tend to operate in what we designate the red zone at one end of a metaphorical spectrum of leadership style and skill, where the emphasis is on characteristics like drive, vision, and risk taking. At the other end of our metaphorical spectrum are functional smart leaders. Intensely focused on and competent in their particular area of technical or business expertise, they tend to wear what we call a blue set of filters, which make them see the world in terms of their own narrow focus. Hence, they are at ease while operating...

Table of contents

• Cover
• More Praise for From Smart to Wise
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Preface
• CHAPTER ONE: Wise Leaders Wanted
• CHAPTER TWO: Shift Your Perspective: Connect to Your Noble Purpose
• CHAPTER THREE: Be Aware of Your Action Orientation: Act Authentically and Appropriately
• CHAPTER FOUR: Gain Role Clarity: Lead from Any Position
• CHAPTER FIVE: Clarify Your Decision Logic: Decide with Discernment
• CHAPTER SIX: Develop Flexible Fortitude: Know When to Hold and When to Fold
• CHAPTER SEVEN: Discover Drivers of Your Motivation: Act with Enlightened Self-Interest
• CHAPTER EIGHT: Cocreate a Field of Wise Leadership: Find Your Wisdom Logic
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Index