From Smart to Wise: Acting and Leading with Wisdom

Evolving from Smart to Wise

Smartness is another word for intelligence, which means many things in both popular understanding and scholarly circles.⁴ Our use of it here is closest to a definition from Robert Sternberg, a renowned contemporary scholar in the area of human intelligence who described “successful intelligence” as “one’s ability to attain one’s goals in life, given one’s sociocultural context, by adapting to, shaping, and selecting environments, through a balance of analytical, creative, and practical skills.”⁵ This is aligned with our own definition of smart leadership as a capacity that goes beyond simply being a smart or intelligent person to being a person who applies his or her smartness through action for moving forward for ...