THE WISE EXECUTIVE

An analogy. Wise executives are few and far between. Organizations are seldom privileged to have a wise executive at the helm. More typically, especially these days, are executives who have wrestled the CEO position for themselves by craft, manipulation, and clever politicking. Typical today is the executive who is a master of persuasion, ego-driven for his own fame and legacy, money mad and ruthless in how people are treated. He or she serves the stockholder, but not the stakeholder in the company.

Who is an executive? Anyone is a position of determining the conditions and makes decisions that affect other people is in an “executive” position. To that extent the person gathers information on people, processes, and things and then decides about how things are to go. There are junior executives and senior executives. There are executives over specific areas or departments, and there are executives over other executives.

In your brain the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex hands the information processing, storage, retrieval, decision-making, restraining, exciting, commissioning, checking, evaluating, judging, and so on. Given that, are you a wise executive to yourself— to fully functioning as a learning, growing, and alive human being?

A wise executive, whether the one in charge of an organization or you —in charge of your own internal organization of thoughts, emotions, speech, behavior, intentions, etc., is one who is able to slow things down, mindfully reflect on values and processes, and come to smart decisions about how to proceed. It is the wise executive who is able to manage the whole system enabling it to operate in ways that support life, well-being, effectiveness, and productivity.

But just as corporate executives often make poor decisions and lead organizations to do very foolish things, so we also— with ourselves. Often we do not produce wise ideas or decisions, but foolish ones. When I recently read Robert Sternberg’s book, Why Smart People can be so Stupid (2002), I was actually stunned by many of the stories of really stupid things that otherwise highly intelligent people did, believed, or proposed. An obvious conclusion is that neither information, nor knowledge, nor intelligence is wisdom. You can be well-informed and end up doing some very foolish things. We all have; it is inherent in being human.

Wisdom requires more. Wisdom requires the functioning of even more of the executive functions in the highest part of the brain and holistic functioning of all of the parts. Much foolishness occurs by over-focusing on one thing to the exclusion of the larger context. Wisdom often requires holding back and restraining yourself from doing what you feel like emotionally saying or doing. Wisdom requires mindful reflection, which is Kahneman’s “slow thinking” rather than “fast thinking” which is also not very typical in the speed of life in the 21 st century.

Wisdom also involves an ethical character— the quality of being a “good” person who honestly speaks the truth, is caring and compassionate, lives with integrity, and is humble rather than arrogant. All of that indicates a well-developed maturity— a maturity that has conquered most if not all of the cognitive distortions and with humility, knows that one is always liable to be influenced by the cognitive biases.

As Jim Collins and colleagues discovered this in organizations, he wrote the book, Good to Great. The greatest CEOs who were at the top of the leadership scale had “a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.” They were— surprisingly— humble about themselves, not ego-driven, it was not about them, and simultaneously (and paradoxically) had a strength of will to pursue a comprehensive vision. This is a “wisdom” that channels ego needs away from oneself and to the higher purposes and meanings.

To be a truly wise executive to yourself— the CEO of your own life, requires a lot. It requires a lot of personal development that culminates in a mature personality. And you have all the resources you need to make that happen. Those resources are the higher or meta-executive functions in your brain. As you access them and develop them— you are developing your personal mastery— the very secrets which is in the Meta-States model (Secrets of Personal Mastery, 1997).