From Smart to Wise: Acting and Leading with Wisdom

The Path to Wise Leadership

Smart leaders start their journey to wise leadership by diligently reflecting on the best practices of other wise leaders and practicing them appropriately in their own lives. Eventually, though, you need to embark on a more personal journey toward wise leadership. Each leader’s path is unique and depends on where each finds herself in terms of the red zone or the blue zone to begin with—and how committed she is to that way of operating in and seeing the world. This is the foundation for developing wisdom logic—a personalized pathway to wise leadership (we elaborate on the concept of wisdom logic in chapter 8).

Many of the wise leaders we studied developed their wise leadership skills as a reaction or response to a ...