Conversations About Courage (3/3)
Foremost business experts share their ideas about this key leadership asset

How do today’s CEOs define bold leadership?

The boldness being recognized and celebrated today is cautious and thoughtful. What you see today at exemplars such as Pfizer, IBM, General Electric and 3M is an ____1____  of big ideas. Their leaders are going back to imagination. They’re funding expensive research, things that may take a little while to pan out*. These visions are modeled on a lot of the entrepreneurial genius in those companies’ histories. The legends they’re ____2____  go back to those pioneers, whether it’s a founder or a key reshaper. At IMB, they’re referencing Thomas Watson Jr. and his ____3____  the IBM 360 mainframe. Even McDonald’s is rediscovering [founder] Ray Kroc. Today’s leaders are asking, “What’s the core nature of our business and how do we stretch it to its limits?”
--- Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Associate dean and professor, Yale Scholl of Management


Stress: Does it stimulate or stifle courage?

There’s a famous graph in industrial psychology that depicts that under very low levels of stress for experienced folks, performance isn’t as great as it is when there’s a modest level of stress. But it’s a parabolic* ____4____ . It goes up for a while---more stress, better performance---but it crests* at a panic point. As stress ____5____ that panic point, performance tapers off*. The calling of a leader is to ensure that each person who works for her doesn’t reach that point and become paralyzed.
--- Michael Useem


Is courage an individual or a group activity?

Courage is not a product of individual behavior. It’s a function of feeling part of a social fabric, of a network that’s going to do something that has never been done before. People do gutsy things because they’re in a group. Leaders articulate those goals and incarnate* the behavior through symbolic conduct to get people to follow.
--- Warren Bennis