Wise Leadership

A Toolbox for Sustainable Success

Eric H. Kessler, Eric Kessler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351015493
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Wise Leadership provides current and emerging leaders with a grounded, intuitive framework to help them understand and master multiple leadership identities, allowing them to adapt seamlessly to different leadership settings and challenges.

Anchored in a wisdom-based approach, Kessler digs into leadership's philosophical core to uncover the six fundamental challenges leaders face and presents the corresponding set of six synergistic competencies or tools that readers can develop to solve them. Bridging scholarship with practice, each part of this leadership toolbox is outlined in a clear and consistent way so that readers can learn exactly when, why, and how to use it. The user-friendly format also eases comparison and customization of the different approaches along with a consideration of their strengths and dangers.

Incorporating colorful examples and practical guidelines, this book will equip both students and professionals with a dynamic repertoire of flexible leadership skills that will help them succeed in any situation.

PART I

Discovering Your Leadership Wisdom

1

THE PROBLEM

Stupid Smart People

There is a better way to lead …

And it is hiding in plain sight

We are drowning in data.

Overflowing in information.

Awash in knowledge.

And we are starving for wisdom.

In this first chapter you will be confronted with a paradox. How can leaders, and by extension the organizations and institutions they run, (1) have more data and more information and more knowledge at their fingertips, yet (2) at the same time, despite the exponentially expanding powers they bring, continue to do so many dumb things?

Fortunately there is an answer. There is a way out of this dilemma.

And as you now know, it is hiding in plain sight.

It is found not from traveling the same path faster but instead by rethinking the path itself. Not from fancier leadership bells and whistles but instead from going ‘back to the future’ and applying classic (but contemporary relevant) leadership insights. In a word, it comes from the ancient concept of wisdom.

Specifically, this introductory chapter will be framed as follows:

• Leadership Idiocy Abounds

• Let’s Stop ‘K.I.D.’ ding Ourselves

• What Wisdom is … and What it is NOT

• Wisdom and Leadership

• A Disheartening and Deteriorating Disequilibrium

• Wise and Shine

• A Roadmap for ‘Wise Leadership’

Leadership Idiocy Abounds

We live in an age of many wicked contradictions. And none is wickeder than the following. It is the ultimate oxymoron. It haunts us as we try to best navigate our life course. And it constrains the success of our leaders as they try to do the same for our organizations.

Here it is.

On the one hand, the world is ‘smarter’ than it has ever been.

We are witnessing an unparalleled upward trajectory of human capacity and potential. This is axiomatic to a point that it has become practically a truism. If you don’t believe me then simply put the book down for a moment and look around. You will no doubt see, dwelling behind nearly everything in your visual field, the potent engine of basic scientific progression fueling remarkable technological and functional advancements. Together this potent cocktail is enabling us to channel, and even alter, the world’s mechanics to go farther, deeper, and faster than ever before. Explore land, sea, sky, and space. Discover the building blocks of matter and the systems of our bodies. Access any fact or connect with any person with just the swipe of a finger. It is remarkable to see how the science of today is scarcely recognizable from that of ten, two, or even one generation past.

According to Buckminster Fuller’s famous ‘Knowledge Doubling Curve’ our accumulated expertise is on a path to double every year, and as recently amended this will soon be reduced to every 12 hours. Just think about it. Picture all that humans have ever known in their roughly 100,000-plus years of existence and now imagine the process repeating, and its pile replicating, each half-day. If true, then, at midnight when an uber-guru managed to learn everything ever codified, they would still be ignorant of about half of what is known by the next noon. A daunting image for sure.

This progression has created an unmistakable trend in the arc of history. Each generation successively leapfrogging its previous, cumulative iterations in the basic realization and mastery of how things work. And it continues to penetrate almost every corner of human activity. To paraphrase Isaac Newton’s famous rejoinder from a 1675 letter, we continue to stand on the upwardly rising shoulders of giants in our collective faculties or ‘smarts’.

This is the good news.

Yet, on the other hand (yup, here it comes) … the world is also ‘dumber’ than it has ever been.

Notwithstanding the aforementioned growth in our knowledge, the daily news is, seemingly without pause or exception, filled with countless examples of human idiocy. With a range and scope too numerous to mention. Whichever examples I could choose to punctuate this would surely be surpassed by countless others in the brief time it takes for the book to go to print, or even in the time it takes for the reader to progress from chapter to chapter, or perhaps even the time it has taken me to type this paragraph.

The Merriam Webster Dictionary prompts us to consider idiocy as acts that display (synonyms) absurdity, asininity, fatuity, folly, foolery, foppery, imbecility, inanity, insanity, lunacy, stupidity … and/or (related words) absurdness, craziness, foolishness, inaneness, madness, senselessness, witlessness; buffoonery, shenanigans, drivel, nonsense, twaddle; blunder, bungle, flub, goof.

Think about it: How much idiocy have you read about recently in our political, business, social, recreational, academic, government, economic, ecological, etc. organizations and their varied pursuits?

To put it bluntly there are just too many smart people doing too many stupid things.

It is overwhelming, it is constant, and strangely enough it is just as predictable as the previous discussion on the advancement of knowledge. And it is characteristic not only of some people but also, alas, of the very ‘best and brightest’ whom we have entrusted to lead our cherished public and private institutions. This is in large part because we have become so preoccupied with more information and knowledge, so infatuated with and reliant on superficial analyses and quick fixes, that we tend not to focus the same energy on developing and deploying deep-seeded leadership wisdom.

This is discussed with particularly lucidity in the book Sapiens, where Yuval Noah Harari’s historical analysis reaches the conclusion that (2015: 415–416):

Seventy thousand years ago, homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem.… We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires, and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens.… Moreover despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals and we seem to be as discontented as ever. We have advanced from our canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttles – but nobody knows where we’re going. We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power.

In other words our collective wisdom has not kept up with our burgeoning knowledge. We have gotten so smart in so many ways but at the same time we remain mired in impenetrable cycles of stupidity. And our leaders and our organizations too often seem lost despite the availability of sophisticated tools for finding their way. Hence Will Durant’s (2014: 36, 158) clarion call: “A wise man can learn from other men’s experience; a fool cannot learn even from his own … (thus pleading) Who will now arise to harness our knowledge to wisdom, our science to conscience, our power to human purpose?”

Upshot: There is an imbalance in the demand for, and supply of, wise leadership. And more than this the demand–supply imbalance is reaching a critical mass where the consequences present critical, far-reaching challenges to us as individuals and we as a people.

This prompts us to answer the critical question of WHY. Why is this happening? Or in more prosaic terms, ‘Why do leaders fail?’ As I will argue later in this book it is primarily because they lack the wisdom to either (1) develop the right tools for the different parts of the job and/or (2) learn when or how to correctly use them. As a result, they do not target and engage their leadership approaches to meet the increasingly complex (short-term snapshot) and dynamically changing (long-term cinema) leadership realities.

It is precisely through this realization that we can begin to chart a path towards wise leadership. Leaders exert great power to shape their organization’s destinies – be they countries, companies, and even families – and thus bear a heavy responsibility when things do not go well. And just like any other role, we can analyze its requirements and then trace the requisite competencies needed to meet them.

We can change the situation. We can become better, wiser leaders.

But to do this we must stop kidding ourselves.…

Let’s Stop ‘K.I.D.’-ding Ourselves

Just as in the book’s opening example, we often travel the path of life with great distraction. We do not always see, or esteem, or prioritize, what is most important. We frequently do not apply our best time and energies to the most significant and valuable issues that, ironically, are the very factors that determine our fates.

And today the distractions are multiplying to dizzying proportions. We are increasingly overwhelmed by endless streams of data. Blinded by new technologies. Overloaded by incomplete and skewed information. Enamored by dubiously collected and zealously professed chunks of decontextualized or incomplete knowledge. And as the aphorism goes, this can be a very dangerous thing.

Ironically it is our expanding capacity for, and socially sanctioned system of, data-information-knowledge processing at the same time that makes us both smarter and dumber than ever. With the acceleration of rote-based training masquerading as education, agenda-based social commentary imitating news, and myopic skewed experimentations sounding the false trumpet of truth, we are losing our way.

It is getting harder and harder to determine what is core. To separate (pick your metaphor) … the masterpiece from its marble. The truth from the trivia. The wheat from the chaff. The music from the static. Thus we increasingly find ourselves managed by, instead of strategically managing, our environment. And in its wake we are actually perpetuating a system that impedes rather than facilitates our progress.

But enough of the abstract. Let’s get personal.

Here is a quick quiz.

Please answer True or False to the following:

Q1: The smarter you are … the more successful you are?

Q2: The smarter you are … the happier you are?

Q3: The smarter you are … the better person you are?

Q4: The smarter you are … the more effective leader you are?

Okay, now here is the answer key.

Ready:

False, False, False, False!

These are cold hard facts. Raw intelligence is NOT a very accurate predictor of success, or happiness, or even other desirable things like depth of spirituality, engagement and citizenship, and sustained leadership effectiveness. Neither are things that can be used to grow our supposed ‘smarts’ like having more money or possessing better technology.

As the movie character Forrest Gump famously quipped, “stupid is as stupid does.” Correspondingly smart, well-resourced people should act smartly – right? But time and time again what we define and measure as smart – our IQ, the degrees hanging on our wall, how well we do on Jeopardy!, nu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Introduction
• PART I: Discovering Your Leadership Wisdom
• PART II: Assembling Your Leadership Toolbox
• PART III: Leveraging Your Leadership Success
• Appendix A: Bibliography
• Appendix B: Summary of Core Wise Leadership Tools
• Appendix C: Sample Syllabus for a Wise Leadership Program
• Appendix D: Exercises to Practice Wise Leadership
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects