First and foremost, we extend our profound gratitude to Professor V. Krishnamurthy. Seventeen years ago, he introduced Prasad to the six wise leadership principles enunciated in the Bhagavad Gita and encouraged him to explore whether those principles could be practiced and validated in today’s management context. The discovery of those principles accelerated Prasad’s journey into practical wisdom. Later, Ed Haskell and Nirmala Lavu graciously helped Prasad develop an assessment tool built around these six principles. Over the past twelve years, Prasad has used this tool to assess over eight hundred executives worldwide and develop their leadership perspective and capabilities. The very foundation of this book is built on those six principles, which we are positioning as the six wise leadership capabilities, and on our own experiences helping hundreds of leaders apply these principles in their daily life.

We could have written this book by churning out page after page of pedantic content based on our collective thirty years of experience studying the topic of wise leadership. Instead, we willingly unlearned our “expert” attitude and learned the magic of humility. We reached out to dozens of people in academia, business, and the social sector who, as experts or as practitioners, had great insights to offer us on how leaders can act and lead with wisdom. We couldn’t have produced this book without their generous intellectual contribution.

In particular, we thank the following leaders whom we interviewed for this book: Prakash Apte, Nancy Badore, Subroto Bagchi, Anthony Carter, Doug Conant, Stuart Crabb, Desh Deshpande, Francis Garcia-Fritts, Kris Gopalakrishnan, Ted Hoff, Arun Jain, Gary Jusela, Nan Keohane, Uday Kotak, Tim Leberecht, Charlene Li, Fred Luthans, Steve Milovich, Mark Milani, Bernie Myerson, Subhanu Saxena, and Liz Wiseman. Our special thanks go to Carey Barbour and Laurie Friedman at IBM for arranging interviews with Ted Hoff and Bernie Myerson as well as IBM’s chairman, Sam Palmisano. We also appreciate Raj Sisodia for introducing us to John Mackay, CEO of Whole Foods Market, and Kip Tindell, chairman and CEO of the Container Store; we had the pleasure of interviewing both of them for this book.

We are also grateful to M. T. Mohan Rao and Swami Bodhananda for clarifying our doubts in differentiating practical wisdom from spiritual wisdom. We are equally thankful to Art Kleiner for seeding the concept of wisdom logic in our mind and helping us reframe the book.

We are greatly indebted to the following generous souls who took time to read our manuscript and offer us constructive feedback: Paul Gleiberman, Ed Haskell, Satya Iluri, Ravi Kant, Juan Lopez, Pavi Mehta, Viral Mehta, Ram Nidumolu, Srinath Pendyala, Jaideep Prabhu, Somik Raha, Sudhakar Ram, Thulsi Ravilla, Arun Sawhney, Syed Shariq, Nirmal Sethia, Dinesh Subraveti, Partha Sundararajan, Bo Tep, Prasad Vemuri, and Al Viswanathan. We also owe much to Stephen H. Rhinesmith, who diligently read each chapter and provided us insightful comments.

This book wouldn’t have materialized without Carolyn Monaco, who introduced us to Jossey-Bass in 2010. At Jossey-Bass, we were lucky to have found Genoveva Llosa, a caring and professional editor. Genoveva is a demanding editor—our manuscript went through a half-dozen iterations under her careful supervision—but her enthusiasm for high-quality work is contagious. In the end, she managed to bring the best out of us as authors by expanding our creative limits.

We are also very lucky to have worked with two highly competent editors: Ernest Beck and Clancy Drake. Ernest worked closely with us to fine-tune the content of our manuscript, and Clancy perfected it and got it to the finish line in great shape. Ahalya Samtaney provided us thoughtful editorial support while revising the earlier versions of our manuscript. In addition, Sarwath Khizrana provided the research assistance for this book project and provided timely and excellent support. We are also thankful to the larger Jossey-Bass team—John Maas, Carol Hartland, and Beverly Miller—for coordinating the whole editing process very smoothly. We also appreciate the timely help by Kathleen Davies at John Wiley in designing the wise leader assessment. We owe them all a great debt of gratitude.

This book is a true labor of love. It took us nearly two years to complete it. During that long period, we politely ignored our friends and even our family members, concentrated as we were on researching and writing this book. And yet rather than feeling rebuffed, our family and friends constantly reached out to us and offered us their full support. Without their caring attitude and continuous encouragement, we wouldn’t have sustained the emotional stamina needed to complete a task as arduous as writing a book. Our deepest gratitude goes to Vinoda, Pravin, and Vidya (Prasad’s family) and Ousha, Lada, Ravi, Guiry, Hari, and Pari (Navi’s family).

Our research on wise leadership was partially supported by the Indian School of Business with generous funding from the SBI Cell for Public Leadership and the Biocon Cell for Innovation Management. We thank and appreciate the support of Dean Ajit Rangnekar, Dean Emeritus M. R. Rao, and Meena Saxena, and our colleagues at the Indian School of Business.