Smart Leaders Get Stuck

We find that smart leaders interpret and act on their fortitude differently and uniquely depending on whether they operate predominantly from a blue or red zone. Functional smart leaders—those who generally operate in the blue zone—tend to create tight boundaries for their work and operate strictly within those limits. Their working style is slow and methodical as they focus on execution until completion. But there is no constancy of purpose or flexibility in leaders’ fortitude when operating in the blue zone. They can get caught up with dreams or irrational fears and give up their projects easily. It is difficult for them to change their mind once it is made up. Stubbornness is one of the issues that leaders who consistently operate in the blue zone have to watch out for. They also take time to evaluate their fit with a project before they take it on. While others might complain about their slow start, functional smart people, who are known for operational excellence, generally cross the finish line and produce high-quality work.

Business smart leaders (in the red zone) are also a tenacious bunch: they can persist in their decisions, defend them against critics, and see their projects through. But they typically demonstrate such persistence only as long as they have something personal to gain—since business smart leaders tend to value rewards and recognition too much. They love to compete with others and like challenging and exciting projects, and they strive to complete them ahead of schedule. They have a tendency to get anxious often and take everything as a challenge. Business smart leaders can be moody and love to multitask, prioritizing what they take on based on what is in it for them personally. For instance, they might drop one project that they had decided earlier to invest time and energy into and jump to another project if it holds the potential to elevate their power and status more quickly. They constantly worry about and plan for their legacy, and that self-centered obsession can often become their Achilles’ heel. Since they want to succeed at any cost, they are able to bounce back from failures with resilience—but they may not necessarily learn lessons from their failures.

Given these personalities (broadly sketched as they are), smart leaders tend to demonstrate faulty fortitude in two distinct ways: they will decide either to put up a good fight to defend and stick to their decision at any cost (this is the case with functional smart leaders), or they will give up too easily and abandon their decision when better opportunities present themselves (as in the case of business smart leaders).

In our consulting work and research, we’ve found that many smart leaders—business types and functional types—tend to stick to what they think are the right decisions, even when they should be regularly reevaluating their decisions to ensure they are in alignment with a rapidly changing external context. They maintain this attitude even when presented with evidence that their decision is wrong. This perseverance, which in one particular context can serve as their core competence or signature strength, can become part of their core incompetence in another context.⁸

Former Intel chairman Craig Barrett is a smart leader whose legendary resoluteness served him and his organization as he swiftly identified emerging business opportunities and decided to invest in them. But that same tenacity became his Achilles’ heel when he persevered in his decision to invest in the ill-fated Itanium computer chip. In the 1990s, under Barrett’s leadership, Intel invested billions of dollars in developing the Itanium chip, which was initially touted as a superchip that would turbocharge Intel’s high-end server business. But the chip never delivered on its promise. At the time, Intel’s customers were reasonably satisfied with Intel’s good-old x86 chips that delivered all the performance they wanted, so they didn’t see the need to upgrade their IT systems to Itanium. With this recognition, Intel’s key partners like Microsoft and Oracle backed away from their initial support of Itanium. Despite the clear writing on the wall and the tepid customer interest, Barrett pushed ahead with investing in Itanium, which later earned the industry moniker “Intel’s Titanic.” When Intel announced Itanium processors in 1997, IDC estimated Itanium sales to be around $38 billion by 2001 though by 2004, they were merely $1.4 billion, and by 2012, the processors were kept alive only because HP had paid $690 million to keep Itanium processors alive until 2017.⁹ Barrett’s fortitude—his courage under fire—is admirable if sticking to his decision pays off for Intel. Otherwise, it is just stubbornness.

Conversely, many smart leaders tend to give up too quickly on productive decisions, either their own or those made by predecessors. The problem is that they are too impatient to wait for their decisions to mature and yield results, so they quickly shut down their own initiatives or those they inherited when they fail to meet even initial expectations.

In March 2010 the CEO of Hewlett Packard at the time, Mark Hurd, made the decision to acquire smart-phone maker Palm for $1.2 billion as a way to enter the mobile devices sector. He set up a three-year program to develop a suite of mobile consumer devices that would be built around WebOS, Palm’s operating system. A year later, HP introduced TouchPad, a tablet built on WebOS. The product received decent customer reviews but fared poorly during the first three weeks on the market. A few weeks later, as unsold inventory of TouchPads began piling up, HP’s new CEO, Léo Apotheker, decided to pull the plug, saying: “Our TouchPad has not been gaining enough traction in the marketplace. We have made the difficult but necessary decision to shut down the WebOS hardware operations.”¹⁰ Apotheker had run out of patience with the new product’s slow progress. Unfortunately, this left HP without a product in a growing tablet market. By the end of 2011, it was clear that PC sales were dropping while tablets like iPad had sold over 55 million since it was introduced in 2010 and HP does not have a product in that segment. It reflects poorly on the kind of fortitude Apotheker demonstrated as CEO.

Business smart leaders sometimes have a tendency to roll back a predecessor’s decisions, even if they were sound, so that they can put their own stamp on the organization by taking it in a new, and perhaps radically different, direction. For example, many public sector organizations hire a CEO from outside with a limited tenure of a few years. During that brief period, the CEO enjoys total power and control and uses it to build a legacy as quickly as possible. Yet every time a new CEO comes in, existing programs are rolled back or replaced with new ones, which shifts the organization into a different orbit. We have seen this dynamic through our work with several large public sector organizations in India. However, this isn’t limited to India or the public sector: leaders in many political, nonprofit, and private organizations worldwide tend to discard older decisions without applying discernment.

In our view, lack of the right kind of fortitude can damage an organization. New leaders must take the time to objectively assess programs and strategies that are already in place to determine which ones need to be kept as is, altered, or possibly abandoned. Sometimes staying on a course charted by a predecessor may be a wiser decision than shifting course just because you have the power to change the status quo.