Dev Patnaik
We don’t need smarter leaders. We need wiser ones. In a world full of ambiguity and noise, wisdom helps you lead with clarity, courage, and care for all of us.
We need you to be wiser. If you’re reading this, you are likely someone who other people depend on as a leader. Someone of influence. Someone whose thoughts impact the world around you.
Mind you, we don’t need you to be smarter –you’re probably smart enough. You know plenty of things. But wisdom isn’t about how much stuff you have on your brain’s hard drive; wisdom is how that stuff is organized. It’s your operating system –your meaning making system. And right now, we’d all really benefit if that system got an upgrade.
Because the world is living through a period of unprecedented volatility. Of massive uncertainty. Of extreme ambiguity. Climate change is causing once-in-a-century weather events to happen twice a year. Artificial intelligence is rewriting job descriptions and obviating professions faster than any workforce retraining program could keep up. Social fragmentation is tearing apart countries and companies alike. All the news you’re hearing about mass immigration is just an early signal of bigger shifts to come. So is government disarray. So is the collapse of global free trade. Those shifts are burning out your leaders and tearing apart your teams.
That’s why we want you to be wiser.
If you can be wiser, you’ll be better equipped to solve the really hard problems that seem to be all around us. Your intelligence and your education are likely good enough to solve the clear but complicated stuff. It’s the ambiguous stuff that’s proving difficult. Playing chess is a complicated problem: it’s hard to learn and takes a lifetime to master. It’s also a very clear problem. There are only sixty-four squares and thirty-two pieces on the board, each with very clear rules. At no point do new pieces show up in the middle of the game with behaviors no one understands. An ambiguous problem is like having your in-laws over to dinner for the first time: it’s what you don’t know that you don’t know that can get you into trouble.
Elon Musk is a terrifying example of a leader who’s great at solving complicated problems like launching a rocket but struggles to handle ambiguous challenges like stewarding an online community. Under Musk’s leadership, SpaceX reduced the cost of launching payloads to orbit by a factor of ten. And yet Twitter’s ad revenue has declined by 47% since he bought it.
We want you to be wiser because the challenges we face aren’t so clear anymore and we keep getting hit with one crisis after another.
If you can be wiser, you’ll be able to come up with better solutions that meet the needs of more people. That’s because you’ll have a wider “sphere of concern.” Most of us start out life focused on ourselves. It’s “Me! Me! Me!” for much of our childhood, culminating in the symphony of bad decisions that most of us called our teens. But if we’re lucky, we upgrade our meaning making systems and start to realize that it’s not “all about me.” We start to be concerned about us –whether us is our family, our team, our tribe, our country, or our company. Harvard professor and former Medtronic CEO Bill George has written beautifully about this “me to we” shift. It’s table stakes for any leader. But if we keep growing, some of us even make the next big upgrade. We discover that it’s not just “all about us” it’s actually “all about all of us.” We take on a world-centric mindset.
Richard Branson has made that journey over the course of his life. He went from being the brash, young founder of Virgin Records to a gracious elder statesman who strives for the shared prosperity of the planet. Not every record company exec of his generation made that shift.
We want you to be wiser because the work we do has a cascading impact beyond our walls.
If you can be wiser, you’ll make life better for everyone around you. Because no matter how much power you think you have, you have more power than you think you do. I don’t just mean the size of the budget at your discretion or the number of people that you have reporting to you. I’m talking about the power that you have to make other people’s day. Or to wreck them. Sigal Barsade at Wharton Business School conducted pioneering research on emotional contagion in organizations. Her research demonstrated that emotions spread in the workplace like a virus and that they have a measurable impact on everything from team performance to job satisfaction and decision-making.
For decades, GE’s Jack Welch was lauded as the greatest CEO in America. But while Welch was indeed able to get an old-world industrial company to perform like a tech stock, the impact on his people could be brutal. An HR exec at GE once showed me a disturbing graph. On one axis was a measure of how senior an employee was at GE. On the other axis was their likelihood to be divorced. The line went straight up and to the right. There has to be a better way to work.
We want you to be wiser because we’re anxious and exhausted and need help getting through the day.
If you can be wiser, then maybe you’ll even make life better for yourself. Research by Robert Kegan at Harvard and others is pretty clear. The higher level of wisdom you have, the less that little stuff bothers you. The more emotionally resilient you are. And the more likely you are to be happy. Conversely, people who don’t do “the work” often find themselves in over their heads. They may be smart enough to do the job – they just don’t have the emotional infrastructure to go the distance.
Roberto Goizueta was the visionary CEO of Coca-Cola for 16 years. A Cuban immigrant and Harvard-trained chemical engineer, the company’s market value skyrocketed from $4 billion to over $150 billion under his leadership. But that growth wasn’t without its personal costs. In a Fortune interview, Goizueta joked, “People ask me if I sleep well at night with all of the competition…I tell them I sleep like a baby – I wake up every two hours and cry.” Goizueta died of a heart attack in 1997 while still on the job.
We want you to be wiser because we care about you, too.
To be sure, it’s not easy to become wiser. Most of us don’t even have good metrics for what great levels of wisdom look like. In my own life, I didn’t start upgrading my own meaning making system until the pain of holding onto my old ways of thinking got too great. That’s when I went in search of answers. And answers are out there. David Rooke and William Torbert articulated a lovely scale for seven levels of leadership, ranging from the Opportunist to the Expert to the Alchemist. Their article is a simple enough read and you can figure out what level you are by reading each description and noticing when they cease to make sense to you.
But reading about wisdom isn’t the same thing as getting wiser. Wisdom isn’t something you develop by reading about it. It requires doing things and reflecting on what you’ve done. Try giving yourself new experiences. Perhaps consider working with an executive coach. Enroll in the kind of leadership program that demands you put concepts into practice. I’m a big fan of the Stagen Academy in Dallas, if only because their core program lasts a whole year and they have specific exercises for you to do every day. Think of it as a P90x exercise program for leaders.
Of course, if you’re happy with how the world is going, then don’t worry about it. If work is becoming so easy that you’re a little bit bored, then ignore my outreach. But if you believe that things can be better —that you can be better—then consider taking one small step before you stop reading this piece. After all, what do you have to lose?
