Stick to Decisions When Appropriate

Wise leaders have a constancy of purpose: they stick with their critical decisions until those decisions produce the desired results. Their perseverance doesn’t come from a sense of ego but the belief they are defending an important decision that serves a noble purpose. For her part, Wendy Kopp never regretted her decision to launch TFA in spite of the enormous challenges and criticism she faced during the first years of its existence. She firmly believed in her vision to improve the quality of education for all students and was firmly committed to serving that noble purpose. In this context, her fortitude and perseverance were appropriate, as they were in service of her noble purpose.

Inspire Others to Support Decisions

We have observed that wise leaders generally don’t make decisions based on popularity or try to convince others of the merits of their decisions. Rather, they believe in the power of the pull approach—of letting the merits of a decision speak for themselves. Instead of convincing other people to support their decision, they inspire them to do so. In 1997, Oprah Winfrey, host of the popular The Oprah Winfrey Show and CEO of OWN Network, launched Oprah Angel Network, a public charity with a vision of inspiring “individuals to create opportunities that enable underserved women and children to rise to their potential.”¹² On her TV show, she requested millions of viewers to send in their spare change to help those in need. That initial request raised $3.5 million and was contributed to 150 deserving students in the form of twenty-five-thousand-dollar scholarships. In about thirteen years, Oprah Angel Network raised over $80 million from over 150,000 donors whose funds support hundreds of inspirational projects in thirty countries that empower women and children.¹³

Like Winfrey, TFA’s Kopp relied on her “power of attraction”—rather than her persuasion skills—to encourage others to join her in the noble mission to educate underprivileged students. When seeking funding for TFA, Kopp didn’t try to convince potential investors with compelling PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets. Rather, she articulated the critical relevance and importance of TFA’s mission and shared inspiring stories from TFA participants that won over prospective investors.

Revise Decisions When the Context Shifts

Wise leaders are open to revising or adapting their decisions—or even reversing them—if they feel that is the right thing to do. They can let go of past decisions—even their own. They are respectful of the past but are not nostalgic for it. They are more focused on building a future that will be better than the present.

Ursula Burns, the current CEO of Xerox, has demonstrated this ability. She retained some decisions made by her predecessor, Ann Mulcahy, but rolled back others, including some strategic decisions that had shaped Xerox’s core identity throughout the twentieth century. Having worked for Xerox for more than three decades, Burns is proud of Xerox’s rich heritage and famous products. And yet she is not nostalgic about the past because she wants to build a new future for Xerox. That includes outsourcing manufacturing and cutting back or even eliminating marquee products. She is moving into new areas, such as business process management, and in the process reinventing Xerox as a high-tech solution provider for the digital era.¹⁴ Taking a cue from Kodak’s misstep in this regard, Burns is disrupting Xerox’s analog business before its digital competitors do.

Draw on Collective Willpower for Transformational Change

The concept of willpower has become popular as the theme of personal leadership and self-help books.¹⁵ Willpower is viewed generally as the inner strength a leader needs to steadfastly see a decision through to completion. The emphasis is on individual willpower and individual ownership of decisions. This focus may be applicable when it comes to personal transformation and may also explain why leaders operating in the red zone, who are so driven by personal goals of success, demonstrate amazing willpower to carry through their vision and decisions.

However, when it comes to big decisions about transforming an entire organization, wise leaders, who often believe in shared leadership, tend to draw on the collective willpower of multiple stakeholders to see these transformational decisions through to completion.¹⁶ Wise leaders perceive organizations and societies as complex nonlinear systems in which change can’t be enabled by any individual agent but instead requires the interaction of multiple agents. Rather than relying on their individual willpower to drive transformational changes in their company—or in their society—wise leaders form coalitions of stakeholders who share ownership of the decision and facilitate systemic changes.

For instance, when Sam Palmisano took over as CEO of IBM in 2002, he recognized the need to revamp the company’s century-old culture to make it more relevant and effective in the new century. “The core responsibility of leadership is to understand when it’s time to change—the organization and yourself—and what not to change, what must endure,” he told us in an interview.¹⁷

For over a century, IBM’s culture had been built on three core beliefs outlined by founder Thomas Watson Sr.: respect for the individual, the best customer service, and the pursuit of excellence. These three principles, which informed leaders’ decisions and actions, had long served the company well, and Palmisano wanted to use them as the foundation for a new set of corporate values that would guide IBM’s success in the future. Given IBM’s democratic culture, he knew he couldn’t impose these values from the top down; instead, he wanted the new value system to emerge from the grassroots to ensure that they would be more than just words handed down from on high.¹⁸

To do this, Palmisano organized a three-day online brainstorming session in 2003, Values-Jam, where over 300,000 IBM employees from around the world were invited to jointly identify and define the best company values for the twenty-first century.¹⁹ During this exercise, employees debated what IBM truly stands for and what it wants to be known for in the coming decades. One thing they agreed on is that IBM should no longer measure innovation merely by the number of patents coming out of its famous R&D labs. Instead, innovation should be measured by the impact of IBM’s technology on society.

That insight led to the formation of a new core value: “Innovation that matters—for our company and for the world.”²⁰ Employees also came up with the values of “dedication to every client’s success” and “trust and personal responsibility in all relationships.” By tapping in to the collective wisdom of all IBM employees, Palmisano facilitated the cocreation of a new set of corporate values that have shaped all major decisions that IBM leaders have made since 2003.