culations, and dropped the idea. Carlzon acted on his intuition rather
than on a painstaking analysis of the numbers: ‘‘I am quite certain that
if I had been a more cautious person, I would have failed completely,’’
adding, ‘‘We had the courage to act . . . as no one else had . . . Once
we dared to take the leap, we gained much more than we ever could
have imagined.’’18
Leaps take courage, but the gains can be tremendous whether you
are Jan Carlzon taking on Air France, David battling Goliath, Moses
challenging Pharaoh to ‘‘let my people go’’ (and then actually going
even though he had no ‘‘map’’ and scarce provisions), or Shadrach,
Meshach, and Abednego leaping into the furnace.
Of course, leaps mean putting oneself at risk. Some people thrive on
risk. One of them is David Johnson, president and CEO of Campbell’s
Soup, who says, ‘‘In a way, what I’ve preached here is having a group
of professionals who put themselves at risk. People who at first go on
the high trapeze and perform triple somersaults . . . and do it safely
while the crowd watches in amazement. And if your people are really
good, you say, ‘Take away the nets.’ The silence is pervasive as the
crowd watches in horror and wonders if you can perform.’’19
Jonathan, King Saul’s son, was willing to take a risk to achieve vic-
tory over the Philistines (the Philistines seem to be the losingest army
in history). Although not perched on the high trapeze, Jonathan and his
troops were lodged precariously in a mountain pass, with the Philistines
perched on the cliffs on both sides of the pass. Jonathan told his men, ‘‘If they come down to us, we will fight them here, but if they call us up,
we will climb the cliffs and defeat them there.’’ When Jonathan’s men
climbed out of their hiding places, the Philistines cried, ‘‘Look! The He-
brews are crawling out of the holes they were hiding in.’’ They then
shouted, ‘‘Come up to us and we’ll teach you a lesson.’’ (1 Sam. 14)
The ‘‘daring young men’’ of Israel climbed the cliff and taught the
Philistines a lesson. They didn’t even need a net. They had courage.
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Another leader who took a daring action is Eric Schmidt of Novell.
He didn’t climb a cliff or swing high on a trapeze. Rather, he told the
truth when almost everyone was advising him not to. He acted with
courage, and his actions encouraged others to do the same. ‘‘When you
enter a downturn . . . you have to fight the instinct to be overly cautious
. . . Rather, you have to encourage your most creative people to take
chances . . . The alternative is to succumb to a culture of fear in which
a bleak vision of the future becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.’’
On Schmidt’s third week on the job, it became evident there would
be a $20 million loss for the quarter. Some ‘‘leaders’’ would have soft-
pedaled this, or ‘‘played with the numbers.’’ Schmidt took a courageous
gamble. He decided to announce the loss. The co-chair of Novell, John
Young, endorsed this difficult decision. ‘‘Later he told me he knew then
he’d made the right decision in hiring me. But after that announcement,
everyone thought that the company was dead as a doornail.’’ Schmidt’s
courage didn’t stop with an announcement. He took immediate mea-
sures to cut costs, develop new products, and make divestitures. Thanks
largely to these courageous decisions, he was able to put the company
back ‘‘in the black’’ within one year.20
Courage often involves speaking one’s mind despite strong, powerful
opposition. Barry Diller is known today as one of the world’s most
powerful media and entertainment executives. But he got there through
a series of experiences that challenged and gradually built his courage.
Diller says it’s important to ‘‘plunge into the uncomfortable; push, or
be lucky enough to have someone push you, beyond your fears and
your sense of limitations. That’s what I’ve been doing . . . overcoming
my discomfort as I go along.’’21
Early in Diller’s career, his boss asked him to read a script and tell the
producer what he thought. After he gave the producer his honest opin-
ion, Diller was thoroughly chewed out. Someone with less courage
might have concluded he was not cut out for the entertainment indus-
try. However, he learned from this experience and went on to select
the scripts for Raiders of the Lost Ark and Flashdance as well as launching a ‘‘big hairy audacious’’ venture, the Shopping Channel.
One of the biggest tests of courage is the willingness to challenge
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those in authority, particularly those who have the power to take away
your job or diminish your influence. Roger Enrico, CEO of Pepsi-
Cola, states, ‘‘One of the things we look for when we are assessing
people on their way up is, ‘Do they have . . . the guts to recommend
what might be unpopular solutions to things.’ ’’22
Hershey Foods believes in this type of risk-taking so strongly that
they have established ‘‘The Exalted Order of the Extended Neck.’’ Ex-
plains CEO Richard Zimmerman, ‘‘I wanted to reward people who
were willing to buck the system . . . to stand the heat for an idea they
really believe in.’’23 Winners have included a maintenance worker who
devised a method for cleaning a machine midweek without losing pro-
duction time, despite other workers’ protestations that ‘‘it couldn’t be
done.’’
One man in the Bible who could easily qualify for ‘‘The Exalted
Order of the Extended Neck’’ is Nathan, a subordinate of the mighty
King David. Nathan not only had the courage to deliver ‘‘negative
feedback’’ to the ruler of the nation (would that Richard Nixon had
had such courageous followers), he also knew how to deliver this feed-
back so that it would be accepted and not denied.
Nathan had watched while King David had sent a man named Uriah
to certain death, assigning him to the front lines of the battle, so that he could take Uriah’s widow as his own wife. Nathan knew he could not
confront the king directly about his misdeeds (at least initially), so in-
stead he told him a parable:
‘‘There were two men in a certain town, one rich and the other
poor. The rich man had a very large number of sheep and cattle, but
the poor man had nothing except one little ewe lamb . . .’’(This was a
veiled reference to King David’s many wives and Uriah’s one wife.)
‘‘A traveler came to the rich man, but the rich man refrained from
taking one of his own sheep to prepare a meal for the traveler . . .
Instead, he took the ewe lamb that belonged to the poor man and pre-
pared it for the one who had come to him.’’
David, oblivious to the true identity of the rich man (himself ), ex-
ploded with anger, ‘‘As surely as the Lord lives, the man who did this
deserves to die.’’
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173
Nathan’s response, one of the most courageous accusations a subordi-
nate ever gave a boss, let alone a king: ‘‘You are the man! You struck
down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and took his wife to be your
own.’’ David was guilty of murder and adultery, and only Nathan pos-
sessed the courage to help him see it, risking imprisonment or death to
set his leader and his nation back on the right course. That he was
neither imprisoned nor killed is a testimony to his consummate com-
munication skills and his accurate assessment of David’s likely response
to negative feedback!
Another modern leader who deserves membership in ‘‘The Exalted
Order of the Extended Neck’’ is Jack Stack of Springfield Re. The
division was about to fail. It was losing $300,000 a year on $21 million
in sales. Its 170 workers were demoralized by a backlog of orders and a
shop floor that was in a shambles. Even the parent company refused to
help, seeing Springfield Re as a lost cause.
Stack’s courageous (and perhaps foolhardy) question: Why not buy
the plant ourselves? It was the most highly leveraged buyout in corpo-
rate history, with eighty-nine parts debt to one part equity, and $90,000
a month in interest payments. Courageous? Yes. A gamble? Perhaps.
But Stack had ‘‘set his face like flint.’’ Like so many of the leaders (biblical and modern) in this chapter, his courage has helped rescue his orga-
nization from ‘‘the valley of the shadow of death’’ and put it back on
the road to prosperity.
BIBLICAL LESSONS ON COURAGE
Courage is not the absence of fear. It is acting despite the
presence of fear.
Acts of courage perpetuate additional acts of courage—by both
leader and followers.
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THE BIBLE ON LEADERSHIP
People are inspired by leaders who are realistic about the