Making the Tough Call

From Inc.Com, by Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis

"Great leaders are celebrated for their judgment. But what is good judgment and how do the best leaders sustain it? It's not a matter of intellect or of the ability to make the right decision in an instant, but of character. Character provides the moral compass--it tells you what you must do. Then there's courage. It produces results, ensuring that you follow through on the decision you've made. No matter what processes you follow, no matter how hard you try, without character and courage, no one can clear the high bar that is judgment. You may luck into making some good decisions and sometimes obtain good results, but without character and courage, you will falter on the most difficult and most important questions.

Jim Hackett, the CEO of Steelcase (NYSE:SCS), the office furniture company, has spent much of his career thinking about what it means to be a leader who operates based on a clear set of values. He began to develop this way of thinking, he says, after a meeting with the hotelier Bill Marriott. The men met at a pivotal moment in Hackett's business career. He was 39 and had become president of Steelcase only six months earlier. Marriott, meanwhile, was then in his seventies and had been running the Marriott (NYSE:MAR) hotel empire for decades. Despite the gap in their ages, the two men had some things in common and they hit it off. "I was young, trying to change an old family business and he was old, trying to change an old family business," Hackett recalls."

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