When Steve Jobs informed Apple’s board in 2000 that he would open the company’s first retail stores, many of the directors were less than enthusiastic. “I’m scratching my head and thinking this is crazy,” recalls Art Levinson, CEO of Genentech and an Apple board member at that time.¹ After all, the board members argued, computer makers like Gateway had ventured into retail and failed big time; others, including Dell, dominated the PC market without owning a single store. What’s more, Jobs’s retail adventure wasn’t based on solid market research or customer feedback. Instead, Jobs asked the board to simply trust his intuition. His strategy was for Apple to manage the customer experience from start to finish, and that included a customer’s first contact with an Apple product in a retail store. Jobs felt that big box retailers were unable to properly convey the brand value of Apple products to these buyers. In that sense, Apple stores would be brand ambassadors rather than a glorified point of sale.

Much to the dismay of the board—one member, Ed Woolard, resigned in protest—Jobs did not relent, believing that his intuition was right. The remaining members reluctantly approved a trial run of four Apple Stores, which, as we now know, have become a retail phenomenon with nearly 400 stores worldwide, over 370 million visitors in just one year, over $180 billion in sales in 2012, and nearly $5 billion in profits.² Apple Stores perform seventeen times better than average retail stores, generating more than six thousand dollars per square foot.³ With their stunning design and open, minimalist spaces, along with a helpful staff and easy-to-use interfaces (like the Genius Bar help desk), Apple Stores have become one of the most potent symbols of the Apple brand, the company, and its products—just as Jobs predicted.

Opening Apple Stores was just one among many other intuitive decisions that Jobs made during his career. From buying the digital animation company Pixar to launching the iMac, through the iPod and iPhone and finally the iPad, Jobs routinely went against conventional wisdom, as well as the advice of analysts and shareholders and his own board and management team. Jobs was both the ultimate micromanager in his fussiness and an imperious decision maker and harbored a deep desire for perfection.

In late 2000, for example, two months prior to the launch of the first Apple Store, Ron Johnson, the vice president who was in charge of creating the stores, suggested to Jobs they organize the layout around customer activities (e.g., movie editing) rather than the products themselves. Jobs went ballistic, according to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, and apparently shouted at Johnson: “I’ve worked my ass off on this store for six months, and now you want to change everything!”⁴ A few hours later, Jobs changed his mind, recognizing that Johnson was right to redesign the Apple Stores around customer experiences. Jobs was willing to reconsider his own decisions—and even adopt the decisions he once scoffed at—if he believed that such a course correction would help deliver a far better experience to the customer.

In many ways, Jobs was an unusual leader. Arrogant, intuitive, and impetuous, he antagonized many in the Apple organization yet at the same time built a remarkable company and inspired loyalty. He was also a wise leader in some ways because he made intuitive decisions while paying attention to the larger context; he usually paused for reflection before making a decision; and he was open to other opinions that went against his—if, that is, those opposing him could withstand his browbeating and argue back to convince him of the merits of their own decision logic. In India, they would say that Steve Jobs had the discernment and discrimination (Viveka) to distinguish not easily visible information and use it to make decisions that connected with the customers and differentiated from the competitors.

Leaders have always been under pressure to make swift decisions. But today that pace is faster than ever before. In such high-pressure settings, we find that most leaders end up doing the exact opposite of what Jobs did: they tend to rush into decisions without proper reflection, rely too heavily on data and analytics, and lack the ability to decide when to stick with their decisions and when to let go of them.⁵ As a result, many leaders make poor choices for themselves in terms of the organization’s values and their own, and they end up paying a high price for them. Complexity, information technology, and globalization are additional factors that affect leaders who are making important decisions. The majority of CEOs in a global CEO study felt they were unable to effectively address escalating complexity and leverage it for succeeding in the future.⁶

This chapter is not about decisions leaders make but what they pay attention to in making decisions: data, analytics, values, logic, and expectations. In this chapter, we show how you can learn to decide with discernment by integrating logic, instinct, intuition, and emotion in making decisions. Above all, ethical clarity will help you make better choices for yourself and your organization in an environment characterized by ambiguity and volatility.