The Functional Smart Leader and the Business Smart Leader

We all tend to have a perspective on life that is relatively narrow, shaped by our predispositions, assumptions, and experiences. Psychologists call this phenomenon our perceptual filter—think of it as a pair of tinted glasses—and describe the ways it conditions how we organize and interpret the meaning of everything we experience in our environment.² The longer you wear your perceptual filter without challenging it or finding a vantage point outside it, the more you tend to get attached to your limited perspective. Worse, you end up seeing only what you want to see and rarely observe anything that is outside your zone of interest. You develop a well-worn autopilot mode and, unknowingly, a tunnel vision: you see only a limited portion of the whole spectrum of smart leadership possibilities and positive human endeavor.

Generally business smart leaders, many of them known for their intensity and risk taking, tend to perceive the world through a set of filters that for ease of identification we’ll call “red.” Business smart leaders thus tend to operate in what we designate the red zone at one end of a metaphorical spectrum of leadership style and skill, where the emphasis is on characteristics like drive, vision, and risk taking. At the other end of our metaphorical spectrum are functional smart leaders. Intensely focused on and competent in their particular area of technical or business expertise, they tend to wear what we call a blue set of filters, which make them see the world in terms of their own narrow focus. Hence, they are at ease while operating within a blue zone, where the emphasis is on qualities like groundedness, execution excellence, and deep expertise. What is highly visible and exciting to leaders operating in the red zone is often practically invisible or unappealing to those operating in the blue zone, and vice versa. Both kinds of smart leaders see what they are conditioned to see, in both cases narrowing their experience of a wider spectrum of reality.

It’s not just senior leaders—or people in the business field alone—who wear these filters. We all wear them—whether we are a teacher, an architect, a husband, a mother, and whether we work in a nonprofit, government, or business. These filters do color our perspective and shape our motivation, decisions, and actions.

To actually see the world as it is, not as we are used to seeing it, we first need to become aware of and then set aside our perceptual filters. It means stepping out of the zone that we know so well and in which we feel capable and comfortable. When we appreciate and embrace the objective world as it is—in its full range of colors, so to speak—and bridge the gap between our subjective reality and the rest of the world, we become capable of wisdom.

Wearing these red or blue glasses all the time hurts us in another way: it prevents us from incorporating certain qualities like prudence, judgment, humility, ethics, and the common good, vitally important when we widen our focus to include the whole spectrum of leadership potential. Many smart leaders have an intellectual understanding of—and an intuitive appreciation for—such qualities, but since they can’t discern them in relation to their leadership privileges and duties, they don’t incorporate them into their role. A leader who removes her filters and experiences the full spectrum becomes highly aware of the gaps between her intentions and actual behaviors—so much so that that values and ethics, which may have been less tangible before, become the cornerstone of her leadership approach.

Gates, for instance, was known for his intensely competitive personality while running Microsoft: you could say that his filters were truly red. Yet after going through the antitrust trial, Gates realized that he was seeing the world differently from the American public, Department of Justice, or judges, and that understanding led to reflection and introspection, which helped him find a larger purpose: using his smartness for the betterment of humanity. By creating the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and taking an active role in it, Gates gradually became aware of his red filters and was able to consciously remove them to gain a larger perspective on how exactly he could best contribute to the world. In the process, he evolved from a smart leader to a wise leader; he didn’t lose or change his essential business smarts, but he became able to deploy his gifts mindfully across a wide range of situations.

Gates’s Microsoft career represents the typical trajectory of business smart leaders who perceive the world through red filters and tend to operate in the red zone. Tim Cook, who became CEO of Apple in 2011, was for most of his career the epitome of the other type of smartness: the functional smart leader who generally operates in the blue zone. A closer look at Cook’s contribution to Apple will show why it’s vital for functional smart leaders to drop their blue filters and step out of the blue zone to grow personally and professionally.

In the 1980s, Apple was not known for its operational efficiency, and the situation was not very different in early 1998, when Jobs interviewed Cook for a position to head up Apple’s supply chain operations. As a functional smart leader, Cook was driven to bring higher efficiency and bottom-line productivity to Apple. He knew how to squeeze every last bit of fat out of operations. While Jobs, renowned for his business smartness, was in the media spotlight and creating great demand for Apple products, Cook operated behind the scenes to manufacture and distribute those products efficiently. Since he became CEO, however, it appears that Cook has begun to remove his blue filters and broaden his perspective. He seems to have realized that he would never be able to match Jobs’s larger-than-life personality, yet he had to serve the interests of Apple effectively at this critical juncture. That apparent change in perspective enabled Cook to step up and take on roles that Jobs had traditionally assumed. In this way, Cook is stepping out of his autopilot zone—the blue zone—and is learning to act as a wise leader.

As he starts to lead with practical wisdom, Cook is now spending more time discussing strategy with investors, reaching out to developers, and focusing on top-line growth. In his first year as CEO, Apple’s stock increased in value by 76 percent, and Apple became the most valuable company in the world. He provided great dividends to shareholders, supported philanthropic activities by matching employee contributions, and defended Apple’s innovation lead by winning a patent infringement case against rival Samsung.³

Cook does not seem to be trying to emulate the agenda or style laid down by Jobs, whom he greatly admired. In other words, he didn’t trade his blue filters for Jobs’s red filters. In moving beyond the functional smart style more often than not, Cook wisely didn’t switch to the style that Steve Jobs, a strong-willed and mercurial business smart leader, had operated from. In fact, many of Cook’s recent decisions are contrary to what Jobs would have done, such as paying dividends and improving working conditions at Apple factories in China. We regard Cook’s actions as more balanced and wiser than many of those Jobs took. He has broadened his perspective with practical wisdom and is evolving into a wise leader.

Gates and Cook alike consciously and gradually detached themselves from their particular type of smartness and discovered a larger sense of purpose. By changing their perspective, they gained wisdom, which provides an ethical compass. You don’t have to be Gates or Cook to become aware of your filters and remove them and use wisdom as a compass to guide your leadership behavior. You can begin your journey from smart to wise leadership right now.