From Smart to Wise: Acting and Leading with Wisdom

Conclusion

Smartness is indeed vital for success in today’s knowledge age, though it appears increasingly insufficient in itself. Yet for many leaders, the unrelenting and single-minded pursuit of smartness has a shadow side on a personal level: they risk losing their ethical clarity, authenticity, and sense of meaning, purpose, and happiness. Smartness is like a double-edged sword: with discrimination, you can wield it to cut through mountains of data to find nuggets of knowledge and insights; without discernment, you risk falling on your own sword. Intelligence, when combined with discrimination and discernment, leads to wisdom.

Traditionally there are two approaches to finding wisdom: a spiritual path and a practical one. Spiritual wisdom ...