From Smart to Wise: Acting and Leading with Wisdom

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 ...