Q & A with Prasad Kaipa and Navi Radjou, authors of From Smart to Wise What does it mean to go from smart to wise? In a leadership context, it means taking your existing smartness to the next level and beyond--not by getting smarter or thinking smarter or working smarter, but by cultivating your practical wisdom. Wisdom leverages your intelligence: your thinking and your leadership become more adaptable, broad-based, and sustainable. Wisdom gives you ethical clarity and a sense of purpose--enabling you to apply your smartness in the service of others. Why should readers care about practical wisdom? The world is changing very rapidly. What you learned when you went to college, when you first started in the company, or when you first became successful will no longer get you results today. In fact, your smartness of today may very well become your in-competence tomorrow. Being smart (even very, very smart) just isn't enough anymore. Wisdom helps broaden your perspective so you can respond to external events with poise and discernment. By bringing a balance between smartness and wisdom you can become more effective and successful. Our message is not that you have to give up or dial back your smartness--not at all. Rather, deliberately cultivating wisdom helps you deploy your smartness and expertise much more effectively. Not incidentally, it also allows you to achieve personal growth and bring long-lasting value to yourself, your organization, and society at large. How will this book help readers move from smart to wise? We'll help you assess where you are currently in your leadership evolution, and offer a six-step roadmap to monitor your progress--along with tools, a framework, and real world examples of smart, wise leaders from Alan Mulally to Ratan Tata to Wendy Kopp. The tools and framework will help you gain clarity about your role as a leader, allowing you to act in ways that are both authentic and appropriate delegate effectively and let others get credit make tough decisions without losing sleep lead and collaborate with people who think, feel, and act very differently from you foster a productive, sustainable work environment Our experience coaching over one hundred senior leaders and teaching these tools to thousands of executives has shown that integrating practical wisdom with business smarts will make you feel less stressed and more capable of managing change. It will help you become an ever more influential, effective leader. Why did you write this book? For 25 years, our work has involved studying how people learn, listen, lead, think, and create--and helping them do it better in a business context. Back then, we were involved in a project where we interviewed about 200 highly accomplished people, including Nobel laureates, CEOs, thought leaders, and athletes, exploring what qualities make them successful. We identified two pathways to success in this group: one that favors smartness and one that leads to wisdom. We found these paths are distinct but not mutually exclusive--in fact, they build on one other. But one, the "smart" path, gets more attention and accolades in today's leadership circles, even though the other, the "wise" path, makes success more sustainable. Since then, we've coached over one hundred senior leaders and worked in executive education settings with about forty thousand executives from all over the world. Our experience has deepened our original insights and given us vast practical experience in their application. It has become clear to us that the path of practical wisdom (incorporating both smart and wise approaches) is essential in these times of greater complexity, accelerating globalization, and rapid technology shifts. We decided to write a book that distilled our decades of work into a practical process that smart leaders could use to cultivate practical wisdom.
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