4

CHARACTER AND COURAGE

image  To Sustain Good Judgment, a Leader Must Have Character and Courage

image  People with Character Have Clear Standards

image  Maintaining Standards in the Face of Obstacles Requires Courage

 

Eleanor Josaitis was a homemaker with five children living in white, suburban Detroit in July 1967 when the city erupted into five days of racial rioting. On the day after the bullets stopped flying, she walked through the downtown streets with her friend and pastor, Father William Cunningham. As they surveyed the horrifying scene of army tanks and still-blazing buildings, they turned to each other and agreed: “We have to do something.”

In the following months, Father Cunningham quit his job as an English teacher at Sacred Heart seminary and began working in an inner-city parish. Eleanor and her husband sold their comfortable home in the suburbs and moved their young family to a neighborhood near the epicenter of the rioting. Together, Father Cunningham and Eleanor Josaitis began building an organization that they aptly named Focus: HOPE. They dedicated it to providing “intelligent and practical solutions to racism and poverty.”1

From a tiny feeding program for women and children, the two of them grew Focus: HOPE, over the succeeding three decades, into a complex social services and educational institution. The feeding program came first because scientific evidence showed that hunger and malnutrition affected the critical early development of children, thus limiting their abilities from infancy. Without equal ability, there could be no equal opportunity, reasoned Josaitis and Cunningham. The children had to get better nourishment to become better learners. So that’s where they started.

The feeding program, however, was never intended to be Focus: HOPE’s primary vehicle for change. The long-term Focus: HOPE objective was to eliminate the need for supplemental food programs by providing opportunities for people to enter the economic mainstream and support themselves. Economic opportunity became Eleanor and Father Bill’s working definition of civil rights.

Through years of setbacks and harassment, they pursued their goal of leveling the playing field for the people of inner-city Detroit. They lobbied Congress for better food programs for the elderly. They filed lawsuits to fight high, discriminatory grocery prices in low-income neighborhoods. Their avowed philosophy of taking a practical, intelligent approach to solving problems led them to understand that they needed to provide people with skills as well as nutrition.

As a result, in 1981 Focus: HOPE opened a school, the Machinist Training Institute (MTI), to teach precision machining and metalworking. Although there were few black machinists employed in Detroit at the time, their skills were in high demand. Josaitis and Cunningham were determined to produce workers whose abilities were so clearly superior that employers would not be able to resist them.

To support its students and help them succeed, Focus: HOPE also opened a Montessori preschool where students and other members of the community could bring their children while they were in class and at work. In 1989 it added a FAST TRACK program to help students improve their reading and math skills in order to qualify for the other training programs, or just to get better jobs in the community. In 1997 it began another, even more basic, First Step reading and math program to help students qualify for FAST TRACK.

By 2007, Focus: HOPE had achieved remarkable results; it had trained more than twenty-seven hundred qualified machinists and graduated nearly six thousand people from FAST TRACK and First Step. Its state-of-the-art Center for Advanced Technologies had graduated more than one hundred manufacturing engineers with associate or bachelor degrees issued by three neighboring universities. Its Information Technologies Center, a partnership with Cisco, Microsoft, and the Computing Technology Industry Association, had graduated nearly six hundred students who had embarked on careers in industry. Meanwhile, it is continuing to feed forty-three thousand low-income elderly, mothers, and children each month.

For the first thirty years, Father Cunningham and Eleanor Josaitis worked together as a team. Since Father Cunningham’s death in 1997, Eleanor has continued as CEO of the organization, pushing it ahead as vigorously as before. In 1997, the very week that Father Cunningham died, a tornado all but destroyed the Focus: HOPE campus. Within twelve months Josaitis was back in operation and had rebuilt the campus.

At first blush, the Focus: HOPE story is one of action, hard work, and amazing results. But it is also a story of excellent judgment. A consistent track record of success does not occur without leaders consistently exercising good judgment on important issues. The judgment to start the Machinists Training Institute was a risky one. Focus: HOPE was running one of the most successful feeding programs in the country, and Josaitis and Cunningham knew that they would be putting it at risk if they undertook such a huge diversification. But they made the judgment that it had to be done, and they made it happen. Likewise, when they did the engineering program it was a tough judgment call. At many points along the way, especially in the early years, a misstep could have sent the whole endeavor spiraling down the tubes.

Two qualities are essential to exercising good judgment: character and courage. No matter what processes you follow, no matter how hard you try, no matter how closely you follow our framework, without character and courage no one can clear the high bar on judgment. You may luck into making some good decisions and sometimes obtain good results, but without character and courage you cannot sustain it. You will falter on the most difficult, and most important, judgments.

CHARACTER

What does it mean to have character? It means having values. It means having a moral compass that sets clear parameters for what one will, and will not do. Character is all about knowing right from wrong and having worked these issues out long before facing tough judgment calls. It is about knowing what your goals and standards are and sticking with them.

We often use the word integrity to describe a person of character, a person whose values and principles are above reproach. Psychiatry speaks of such people as integrated. Character plays the guiding role in how honest personal feedback and coaching are in the organization, how internal competition and politics are handled, and how suppliers and customers are treated. The CEO’s character sets the stage for all the important judgment calls.

For us, character also means putting the greater good of the organization, or of society, ahead of self-interest. As Peter Drucker put it, it is about worrying about “what is right” rather than “who is right.”2 There is a kind of rigid linear logic that might lead some people to argue that Hitler must have made a lot of good judgment calls because he succeeded as well as he did in achieving the evil results he was seeking.

Using this same kind of logic, you could also argue that the Dennis Kozlowskis (Tyco), the Bernie Ebberses (WorldCom), the Andy Fastows (Enron), and all the other corporate crooks caught up in recent years’ scandals attained their goals of amassing vast amounts of power and money. They just messed up on the final judgment call, the one that would have told them when to quit. But we aren’t going there. We are absolutely convinced that good judgment requires good values. Evil outcomes, even if they are the intended outcomes, can never be considered successes, and immoral judgments are never good ones.

Character is that distinctive, unfiltered personal voice that cannot be faked or imitated. It is the core essence of who we are. And perhaps in today’s world, it is more powerful than ever before in shaping our actions. Chaos isn’t just a theory, it is the current reality; learning to live with it, even love it, is an essential element of success today. As Jack Welch told us, “If you’re not confused, you don’t know what’s going on.” The pace of everything is accelerated. There is less time for thinking, less time for our intellectual brains to override our baser instincts. In a way, the difference between life in the old-style organization and in the new is the difference between golf and surfing. These days, you need to be able to ride the breaking wave of constant change. There is no stopping to change your equipment. Even when they have time to wallow in making a judgment, leaders never have all the facts, and the situation is constantly evolving. You are always making judgments on the fly.

Jim Hackett, CEO of Steelcase, told us the story of meeting Bill Marriott. Hackett was a young thirty-something president of Steelcase. Marriott was the seventy-something-year-old founder of the Marriott hotel empire. It was the early 1990s and a consultant had put them together because, as Hackett put it, “I was younger, trying to change an old family business and he was older, trying to change an old family business.” He was running his business by his values.

Despite their differences in age and experience, the two men hit it off and spent a lot of time talking about values. Hackett recalled the plane trip home from Washington to Grand Rapids, Michigan. “I thought of the peace that this man had, in knowing what he needed to do. How could he make so many of the important decisions at Marriott grounded in his strong set of values? He was at total peace. Now being thirty-nine years old, maybe six months in the job, you do not have a lot of peace as a CEO. And it occurred to me that I wanted that peace. I wanted the opportunity to be able to make decisions and have the comfort of knowing that I had made the right decision.”

Over the coming months, Jim Hackett kept thinking about values. Later that year, he gave a talk to his management team. “I talked about when a plane flies it has what’s called an altitude and attitude indicator. It tells you whether it’s at the right height and whether it’s level. And so I was looking for the metaphorical attitude indicator inside me. What would tell me that as I was pointing the company in the right direction, that I was still on the right plane, like Mr. Marriott had understood. What is that inside people that gives you peace?”

At the end of the day, he reasoned, “there will be a list of things I didn’t do right, because that’s the human condition. We’re not going to be able to design that out. But you can be at peace knowing that you have values and know what they are.”

Jeff Immelt of GE calls leadership judgment “an intense journey into yourself. It’s a commitment and an intense journey into your soul.” But while you need to have rock-solid values, you also need to keep working on them, and on yourself. “Are you willing to take those journeys,” he asks, “to explore how you can become better, and do it every day? How much can you learn? Can you look in the mirror every day and say, ‘Geez, I wish I had done that differently, boy I think we have to, I have to do better here.’ A commitment to lead change to make the organization better it starts with having the courage to be a constituency of one.”3

Speaking to a group of first-year business students in 2002, Jim Hackett chose the importance of having clear values as the topic for his talk. “Navigating through your life, in business, is something that you have to start with today,” he told them. “You have the benefit of great teachers, people who can share with you as you navigate, but [at some point] you are going to find yourself faced with a decision that calls your core values into play. Bill Marriott’s conversation kept coming back to me regarding the peace of mind you can achieve by having strong values to guide the paths you take.

“I said to myself, you know on that airplane, I need to know right now how I’m going to think when I’m posed with the biggest dilemma that I might face. No one around, I’ve got to know right now how am I going to act?”4

Ten years after that meeting with Bill Marriott, and just a couple of years before that talk with the students, Jim Hackett was faced with a business judgment that had far greater implications than he could have known at the time.

The issue was fire retardants. Steelcase had begun selling a new line of products, with surfaces designed to be exchangeable between office cubicles and floor-to-ceiling walls. The advantage of this was that building managers would have to store only one kind of surface. But then Steelcase, which had a lot of experience in the cubicle business but not in the wall business, discovered that the material was not up to fire standards when used for floor-to-ceiling walls.

When they discovered the problem, Hackett said, “We had not had one damaged installation. Our customers even called us and said ‘Oh, don’t worry about it. What you’re worried about, no one will ever have a problem.’ We even had people inside the company say maybe it’ll never be exchanged. You see, it was sold as exchangeable, but how often people would do it, we didn’t know.”5

The picture was further befogged by the fact that there is no one universal fire code. The standards vary by municipality. So just how fire-retardant would fire-retardant enough be? How far off the mark were they?

This is where Jim Hackett’s character determined the answer. Steelcase recalled all the panels, replaced them with ones that met stricter fire codes, and took a $40 million write-off. Along the way Jim and all of Steelcase’s executives lost their bonuses.

Going back to his airplane analogy, he explains: “I already have to know how I’m going act before I get there, because when all the pressure’s on you to perform, the last thing you want to do is be searching for that attitude indicator. That pilot’s looking for stability as they’re coming in with the zero visibility and the thunderstorms and so forth, so you don’t want to be experimenting with stability at the time you’re making tough decisions…. You have to develop these points of view. How are we going to act when we get in trouble, because I can guarantee you in business, you will.”6

For Jim Hackett, the day of reckoning came on September 11, 2001. When the airplane hit the Pentagon that morning, the product that was behind that wall was the new Steelcase fire-code material. “It was determined,” Hackett said later, “with all the jet fuel and fire, if the new Steelcase material was not there, the fire would have spread in a far more disastrous outcome.”7

This is a spine-chilling story of the sort that most leaders don’t have to tell. Often, doing the right thing averts disaster, so there is no story to tell. What if someone somewhere along the line had drawn a hard line and insisted that the levees in New Orleans be strengthened? Or if someone at NASA had resisted the pressure to launch the shuttle Challenger because there were questions about whether the O-rings would work after sitting on the pad in unusually cold weather. Would we have heard about it? We guess probably not.

Katrina would still have been a horrific hurricane, but the most severe damage and disruption came from the flooding. If it hadn’t happened, some people might have said, “Thank God the levees held.” But it isn’t likely that they would have noticed enough to put a name on the person who acted as God’s agent in making the good judgment call. And the Challenger, well, it probably would have been launched at a later date and made an uneventful flight.

But recognition is not the important thing. People with character are more concerned with self-respect than public esteem. They have clear standards, they know what those standards are, and they hold themselves accountable. It’s taking responsibility, in knowing that judgments have enormous, life-and-death consequences.

Having character as a leader is, if nothing else, the acceptance of consequence and responsibility.

COURAGE

Character and internal standards to calibrate one’s decisions and keep them on “the right plane,”8 as Jim Hackett puts it, is a fundamental requirement for building a track record of good judgment. Without good character, without strong moral fiber and a sincere desire to put the greater good above personal gain, a leader’s judgment will stray too often to the pragmatic and expedient. The hard choices that good judgment often requires will not get made.

But judgment in our definition is about more than decision making. It is not only about coming up with the right solution to the right problem, but it is also about producing results, delivering the goods. And this is where courage comes in. Noel has, from time to time, made it a practice in his workshops with both client companies and business students at the University of Michigan to ask them to write about good and bad judgment calls that they have made. Discouragingly often, the bad judgment stories include a statement to the effect: “I really knew in my gut what I should do, but I didn’t do it.”

Having the courage to act on your standards is an integral part of the bundle of what it takes to exercise good judgment. The standards by themselves aren’t enough. In fact, if you don’t act on your “standards,” there is some question as to whether they really are your standards.

Over twenty years ago, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman contrasted two types of stupid action (or inaction):

Ready…Fire…Aim

Ready…Aim…Aim…Aim…Aim…aim….9

Shakespeare’s Hamlet was always “aiming,” never firing, except at the wrong time and at the wrong victim. One reason for the lasting significance of the play is Hamlet’s inability to act. Virtually every thoughtful person, and surely every thoughtful leader, has experienced that excruciating state. Despite Hamlet’s knowing everything he had to know, despite his awareness that killing Claudius was the only honorable thing to do, his fits and starts mesmerize us through five long acts. “This uncoupling, this sense of inward thoughts and feelings painfully cut off from the world around him, haunts virtually all of his relationships.”10 This “uncoupling” reinforces the imperative of action. Character, without courage, is meaningless, except in tragedy.

The courage required to exercise good judgment comes in many forms. Sometimes it is standing up to open direct threats. In the late 1960s, when Eleanor Josaitis decided to move her family into inner-city Detroit, her mother hired an attorney to take her five children from her. Her father-in-law disowned her, and her brother-in-law asked her to use her maiden name so no one would know they were related. Her mother came around to her side pretty quickly, but her father-in-law never did, and it was thirty-five years before her brother-in-law apologized.

Over the years, Eleanor Josaitis has also received a steady stream of threats and hate mail. She has been called every name in the book by racists and other people who are threatened by Focus: HOPE’s success. Through it all, she has persisted. She even has a collection of hate letters that she has saved. She keeps and appreciates the touching letters of thanks from admirers and people that Focus: HOPE has helped. But, she says, it’s the hate mail that reminds her what she is fighting and gives her the energy to carry on the good fight.

And well into her seventies, she is still going strong, doggedly and defiantly standing up for her values. On 9/11, as fears were mounting about a possible violent backlash against Detroit’s large Arab-American community, Eleanor called together all six hundred people who were on the Focus: HOPE campus that day. They talked about what had already happened in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, and then they all signed a copy of Focus: HOPE’s mission statement. The statement, adopted in 1968, reads:

Recognizing the dignity and beauty of every person, we pledge intelligent and practical action to overcome racism, poverty and injustice. And to build a metropolitan community where all people may live in freedom, harmony, trust and affection. Black and white, yellow, brown and red from Detroit and its suburbs of every economic status, national origin and religious persuasion we join in this covenant.11

After the meeting, the Detroit Free Press asked Eleanor to write an editorial, which she did. Drawing on her and Focus: HOPE’s core principles, she wrote one that ran under the headline “Strive to Build a World that Embraces Diversity.”12 A couple of days later, she received one of her favorite letters. It simply said: “Shove diversity up you ass, bitch.” She carries it around with her to this day.

Like Eleanor Josaitis, Harry Truman was not flagged in his youth as the extraordinary leader he later became. According to a number of biographers, Harry Truman’s leadership was defined by his experience in World War I.

David Gergen writes:

The course of his life changed forever when, at the age of 33, he signed up for the Army to fight in World War I…. His initial test came on a rainy night in the Vosges Mountains. The Germans had dropped an artillery barrage close by, and his troops, panicked that they were being gassed, ran for it. In the frenzy, Truman’s horse fell over on him and he was nearly crushed. Writes [David] McCullough: “Out from under, seeing the others all running, he just stood there, locked in place, and called them back using every form of profanity he’d ever heard…shaming his men back to do what they were supposed to do.” They regrouped, got through the night…. Throughout the rest of their lives were loyal to Harry Truman.13

The historians tell us that this unexpected stand and its results surprised Truman as much as anyone on the field. But once he had this experience under his belt, he was set on a life of courageous living.

Unlike Eleanor Josaitis and Harry Truman, most of us are rarely, if ever, called on to exhibit physical courage and defiant courage in the face of open hostility. More often, it’s quiet courage that is demanded of us. It’s the courage to make the intense inner journey and to recognize and embrace what is right.

It’s the courage that P&G showed in closing down plants in Africa for a year, rather than pay bribes. It is the courage that Jim Hackett showed in recalling the panels and taking the $40 million write-off despite pressure to make his earnings numbers. It is the courage to take the hard road, despite all the obstacles, because you should.

And, obstacles there will be. There will be obstacles within the organization. Resources are always limited, so you need the courage to make the hard budgeting decisions. Then there is the courage needed to do whatever else it takes to get the judgment carried out successfully. Maybe it’s laying off people whose talent or temperament won’t fit with the new plan. Or maybe it’s hiring ten thousand new people. Or, maybe it’s getting old antagonists to work together.

In any difficult judgment, there will always be people who disagree with it. A wise leader is exquisitely aware of where all the interested parties sit, and works to keep them on the team. But even in a group where most of the dissenters fall in behind the decision once it is made, there are almost always at least a few who will fight it. The leader then must have the courage to throw them out if they get in the way.

There will be obstacles—call them challenges if you like—that are beyond one’s control. These are the external forces, often with gale-force winds. Sometimes the important climate is political. Often it’s competitive and social as well. These are forces one cannot control, but one must have the courage to persevere despite the uncertainty and lack of control.

In important judgment calls, there are always stakes. There is always something big at risk. Otherwise, the judgment wouldn’t be an important one. This is where a lot of leaders fall down. They avoid making calls because they don’t have the courage to take the risks. Think of Ray Gilmartin. Even though the failure to make a courageous judgment and take a stand is ultimately what kills them, they can’t bring themselves to act. Andy Grove, on the other hand, who named his book about Intel Only the Paranoid Survive,14 got his courage from his fear about what would happen if he didn’t step up to the helm and sail boldly out into the storm.

Perhaps the biggest obstacles leaders face are the ones they set up for themselves. They shy away because of self-doubts. Or, doing the right thing is just going to mean a lot of very hard work, and they are afraid that they can’t do it. So they make compromises.

Joe Liemandt, the founder and CEO of Trilogy, an enterprise software company that he founded with four friends while they were students at Stanford in 1989, talks about a judgment he made in 2000. It was the era of e-commerce and whirlwind product development. Like many other high-tech companies, Trilogy had a habit of over-promising and underdelivering to customers. Trilogy’s practice, as he explained, was to deliver software that would perform exactly as the salespeople said it would, but often it did not produce the positive results anticipated by the customers. Sometimes the software wasn’t really the appropriate solution to the customer’s problem. Sometimes the customer just never figured out how to make the software work. But, in any event, Trilogy would deliver the software, collect its money, and then move on to the next customer.

“The business model was one where you sell it, it works according to spec, and then—a couple years later—the customers say, ‘I didn’t get anything for this.’ We’d respond, ‘Well, it works, the product works…. If you look at the contract, it says here are the specifications that the software will do, this is how fast it will operate. These are all the various aspects of it. And it completely meets those specifications. If it doesn’t meet spec, we’ll give you your money back. But it absolutely meets specification.’”

This was a common practice in the industry and in the era. Trilogy was not alone in this. In the enterprise software business, an estimated 50–80 percent of Fortune 500 global projects failed. The Wall Street Journal was full of articles about companies taking big write-offs because an enterprise software project failed. One year, Hershey committed the unthinkable sin of not having enough chocolate for Halloween because they were putting in a big system and it simply didn’t work.

But in 2000, says Liemandt, “we woke up as a company and realized that we couldn’t keep acting like this entrepreneurial startup…. We had to change everything about how we looked at the world. We also needed to change how we measured our success—from building great products and shipping them, to measuring our success based on our customer’s success.”

Liemandt, who is an energetic and enthusiastic person, began in his signature manner to talk up the new idea around the company. A lot of people in the company agreed, but when he went to the head of his consulting unit, he got a firm push back. “Joe,” the consulting head said, “there’s no chance we’re going to make our customers successful. You know, it’s just too hard and we’ve known it’s been too hard for ten years and that’s why we haven’t done it for ten years, Joe. What makes you think everything’s going to change tomorrow?”

Liemandt describes this as a pivotal moment. “That’s when I started to be able to sort out what was good vision, or what I felt was good vision, but superhard to execute versus bad vision but that you could execute. Then once I started to realize that this set of objections isn’t that the vision’s bad, or the strategy is bad. It’s just so hard you just can’t get over it. You’re caught up in making bad decisions just because it’s too hard. You’re saying to yourself: ‘I think this is a great idea. It’s too hard to do. Let’s discard it. Or I think this is a great idea but emotionally, I don’t want to deal with the fallout.’”

As a result of this insight, Liemandt says he went on an inner journey of the type that Jeff Immelt described. “I realized that I needed to change my thinking 180 degrees and my viewpoint of the world and my mental model,” Liemandt says. “That took time and conversations and me just thinking about it and talking through it. And over time it became clearer and I was able to project into the future, and describe this future company that we were going to be. Once I could project and paint the future picture, all my objections moved from being these reasons I wasn’t going to make the decision to just obstacles to overcome to get to this good goal.”

Another type of self-imposed obstacle comes from the pressure to succeed. Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic, talks about how this pressure can

pull us away from our core values, just as we are reinforced by our “success” in the market. Some people refer to this as “CEO-itis.” The irony is that the more successful we are, the more tempted we are to take shortcuts to keep it going. And the rewards—compensation increases, stock option gains, the myriads of executive perks, positive stories in the media, admiring comments from our peers—all reinforce our actions and drive us to keep it going.15

George goes on to say in his book, Authentic Leadership: Rediscovering the Secrets to Creating Lasting Values,16 that leaders have to resist those pressures while continuing to perform, especially when things aren’t going well. That’s exactly when character is essential. Thomas Carlyle, the nineteenth-century Scottish social philosopher, wrote: “The ideal is in thyself; the impediment, too, is in thyself.”17 The leaders in our study, like George, seemed to have overcome whatever impediments stood in their way. Most of those impediments were dissolved by a regular, ruthless self-scrutiny. They seem to have a built-in moral compass, a vigilant superego that constantly evaluates their motives and monitors for right and wrong.

Another leader with unusual strength of character is Novartis’s CEO, Daniel Vasella. He discussed pressures, almost identical to George’s, in an interview with Fortune:

Once you get the domination of making the quarter—even unwittingly—you start to compromise in the gray areas of your business that cut across the wide swath of terrain between the top and the bottom. Perhaps you’ll begin to sacrifice things that are important and may be vital for your company over the long term…. The culprit that drives this cycle isn’t the fear of failure so much as it is the craving for success. For the tyranny of quarterly earnings is a tyranny imposed from within…the idea of being a successful manager is an intoxicating one. It is a pattern of celebration leading to belief, leading to distortion. When you achieve good results, you are typically celebrated, and you begin to believe that the center of all that champagne toasting is yourself. You are idealized by the outside world, and there is a natural tendency to believe that what is written is true.18

One of the most common impediments to making wise judgments is the isolation of the leader. Vasella alerts us to a form of isolation to which successful leaders are vulnerable. This is the form, often pernicious, related to a lifetime spent striving, driven by its almost palpable intoxication of success. Many of the most celebrated and gifted leaders are constantly struggling to find a balance between their constant hunger for success and the other attributes of a meaningful life.

Warren recalls a talk he had with the late John Gardner in August 2001. Gardner was in his eighty-seventh year. He had had a long and storied career: a former cabinet secretary under Lyndon Johnson, founder of Common Cause, and an important public intellectual. He had also been a marine officer in World War II, honored for his bravery in combat. The previous day Warren had interviewed the two cofounders of Embark.com, Steve Chen and Young Shin, both in their early thirties. That week, due to the dot-com crash, they were forced to lay off twenty-five of their one hundred employees, some of them close friends. So he asked Gardner, “What’s more courageous, firing your best friends or risking your life at Iwo Jima?” Gardner thought, and slowly answered. “I don’t know…I can’t possibly answer that question.”

Some might not agree with Truman, that saying no to a friend is more courageous than facing a duel. Former chief of staff of the U.S. Army, General Eric Shinseki, who was badly wounded in Vietnam, publicly disagreed with his superior, Donald Rumsfeld, about troop requirements for the Iraq operation. Was that more or less courageous than facing enemy mortar shells? Dr. Susan Wood quit the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) because her boss, Commissioner Lester Crawford, delayed approval of a drug.

In 1943, Jesse Bernard, a Roman Catholic priest from Luxembourg, was imprisoned at Dachau with some three thousand other priests, pastors, and bishops for opposing the Nazis’ religious “reforms.” The Nazi commandant of the death camp offered to free the priest if he would return to Luxembourg, to convince the archbishop there to accept Nazism. Instead, Father Bernard chose to die.

A friend drove off to Mississippi, one day after Katrina hit, to help rescue those who were stranded and to recover the bodies of the dead. A former student took leave from his doctoral work and re-upped in the National Guard to join his buddies in Iraq.

Whether a decision is popular or not often doesn’t count for much in the long run. Truman claims that his most unpopular decision, firing General MacArthur, was one of his best. He said that ordering the atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima, his most controversial decision, was also relatively easy; he concluded it was the only way to keep America’s butcher’s bill from continuing to grow.

These two decisions by Truman bring us to another very important point. The courage of a wise person is close-knit with his or her character. While good character without courage can be worthless, courage without good character can be, and often is, dangerous.

Courage without character gives you the Wall Street swindlers who brashly and brazenly push worthless goods on an unsuspecting public. It gives you “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap, who in the 1990s was first heralded as a successful turnaround leader as CEO of Scott Paper for his slash-and-burn strategy, but ended up being demonized as the destroyer of Sunbeam. In each case, he came in and started slashing jobs and operations. This produced mountains of cash, for which Dunlap earned tens of millions, but it also destroyed not only the jobs and lives of thousands of workers but, ultimately, the strength of Sunbeam. The problem with Dunlap was not that he laid off workers and cut operations; many wise and brave leaders have been forced to make huge layoffs to reposition foundering companies and get them on solid footing. The problem with Dunlap was that the cuts did not help Sunbeam thrive and be a contributing member of the community. Rather, his primary motivation appeared to be personal greed. That led him to make judgments that were not in the greater interest of the company and its broader constituency of stakeholders. The board at Sunbeam ultimately fired him in June 1998 after the stock went from a high in March of that year of $52 down to a low in June of $8.

A leader who has exhibited character and courage throughout his career is Bob Knowling, currently CEO of the private company Vercuity, former senior executive at Ameritech, U.S. West, and Covad, and CEO of the New York City Leadership Academy (training school principals). Knowling’s character and courage were shaped growing up poor and having to face racial discrimination of one sort or another just about every day of his life.

Being black challenges him to this day, ranging from the corporate jet staff who did not know he was an executive at Ameritech and telling him that the chauffeurs are to wait in the cars, to the police in Atherton, California, hassling him because a black guy was driving a Jaguar XK8 convertible. He channels his energy to make the world a better place and is a strong supporter of Eleanor Josaitis at Focus: HOPE and is on his own journey to join her with “practical solutions to racisms and poverty.”19

Knowling took two and a half years off from the business CEO track and invested it in giving back to society. He took the job of founding CEO of the New York City Leadership Academy, which was set up to provide leadership development for New York City school principals, all twelve hundred, as well as ninety aspiring principals each year. Bob dedicated these years as a way to give back to the community. He worked with Joel Klein, the New York City chancellor, to help in the massive school transformation going on in New York. Along with help from CEO board members Jack Welch; Dick Parsons, CEO of AOL Time Warner; Walter Shipley, the former chairman/CEO of JPMorgan Chase; David Coulter from JP Morgan; and Sy Sternberg, CEO of New York Life, they raised close to $100 million and provided leadership development workshops and mentoring for all twelve hundred principals.

 

This is a book about leadership judgment. We are not interested in leaders who cross the line by compromising on values of integrity and decency. We are only interested in leaders whose character and courage are exhibited when no one is looking.

Trust is the emotional glue that holds teams together. As Jim Hackett told us: “You can’t lead if you don’t have trust and you can’t have trust if you don’t have integrity.” Hackett went on to tell us: “I was getting the crap beaten out of me by the analysts. But my mentor at Steelcase said don’t listen to them, just do what’s right. He was right.”

Leading with character gives the wise leader clear-cut advantages. They are easier to trust and follow; they honor commitments and promises; their words and behavior match; they are always engaged in and by the world; they are open to “reflective backtalk”; they can admit errors and learn from their mistakes. They can speak with conviction because they believe in what they’re saying. They are comfortable in their own skin. They feel at ease in the spotlight and they enjoy it there. They tend to be more open to opportunity and risk.