In some ways, courage is the most important quality. That’s because it enables everything else to happen. It enables us to act on our deepest convictions and move forward, even when faced with incomplete information. It gives us the strength to stand alone when necessary. In early 1986, a few months before becoming president of P&G, I made this journal entry to express the deep emotions I was feeling at that point in my life:
To be greatly ambitious while knowing one’s limitations takes courage. The counsel of timidity is to stay low rather than to risk great failures. The counsel of cowardice and prudence is to avoid getting hurt. I need to lead boldly and with confidence. I will. Courage is basic. Without courage there is no virtue.
Nelson Mandela said it well: “Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.”
My own experience has proven this to be true. To me, courage means:
- Being willing to put aside fear of failure, recognizing that to accomplish anything of real value, we must risk
wrong decisions. - Being willing to take a stand long before I’m certain of success.
- Standing firmly for something I believe in and not allowing the views of others to deter me.
- Fighting for what I believe in, especially if it’s controversial.
- Being willing to ask others for their commitment: To ask “I need your help now”; “I need you to believe in
each other.” Not always easy requests to make, but often necessary.
Courage is the willingness to follow your deepest instincts, even if the future is not clear. I’ll always remember what a speaker said at my oldest son, John’s graduation: “Sometimes you have to leap before you look.” You're called to embark on something you’re not sure you can do, but you know it’s right and you know you need to try. I have found many of the most important things in my life have been like that.
That was the case when we entered new business categories in China and Eastern and Central Europe. It was also the situation when we undertook Organization 2005. As I’ve said, I wish I had done differently many aspects of that organization change, but even so, I know it was right to move ahead.
I called on the strength of courage in early 1999 when I agreed to lead the Development Campaign for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. I didn’t know then exactly how we would achieve our fund-raising goal of $110 million, but I felt certain that this institution could bring great benefit to racial understanding and cooperation in this country, and that I should play a part in making it happen. These decisions were ultimately sound. They were guided, in the words of Bart Giamatti, by the combination of all my “sometimes contradictory inner truths, the visceral, the open-hearted and the tough-minded.”
I’ve found that you cannot make important changes or introduce new ways of working without controversy. Today, the notion that effective teamwork is critical to achieving a high-performance work system would cause little disagreement. But my journal notes reveal that this idea was not readily accepted as I introduced it to our U.S. organization in December 1986:
Still a lot of controversy within the division manager group on the role of teams. I need to make my position clear and spell out more effectively the direction I want to go. I’m plowing ahead, saying as boldly and as clearly as I can what I believe is the right course for us to follow and why.
“Plowing ahead” is usually what it takes. I was reminded of this recently as I contemplated the anguished words of a distraught U.S. State Department official lamenting the world’s prolonged lack of response to the mass killings in Bosnia: “If you want to take ownership of an issue, you have to do more than hold meetings. You have to make risky decisions and prove you have the courage of your convictions.”
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Courage is an intensely personal matter. It is physical and moral. We muster and strengthen it in the depths of our hearts and souls, sometimes during the lonesome dark of night. We are tested and challenged. But in the end, it is the defining strength from which great achievements are born.
Sometimes we’re conscious of acting courageously, and sometimes we’re not.
Laurent Philippe, who led our business magnificently in Morocco, then Russia, then Greater China, and who is now leading our Western Europe Market Development Organization, recently shared this recollection with me:
It was October 1998 in Moscow, only a few weeks after the dramatic devaluation of the Russian currency. You and I had been store checking the whole day. Moscow was gloomy, as only Moscow can be at the early approach of winter. I recall we did not see a single P&G shopper that day. We had abruptly priced up to recover dollar sales, but local ruble salaries had been kept under close check by the government. I was pretty depressed. But you were forward looking, as always. First, you bought a tube of Blend-a-Med for yourself, gently pretending that you had forgotten your toothpaste from home. So we had at least one P&G purchase decision made that day. More importantly, several times you expressed to the group your strong conviction that the leading brand equities and share positions
we had built in Russia before the crisis would serve us well, and that after the crisis we would emerge stronger than ever before. As we now know, this is exactly what happened. What a great lesson of courage and of leadership you gave me on that very day!
What I said to Laurent and our team that day wasn’t calculated. It wasn’t a special intervention. In fact, I didn’t recall it at all until Laurent brought it to my attention more than six years later. All of which can serve to remind us that often our most meaningful acts of leadership are spontaneous, drawing on our commitment to service and to our deepest-held values of courage and persistence.
While acts of courage are intensely personal, we can nurture and encourage courageous acts from others, as well. I often ask individuals participating in a large group for their personal point of view. For a moment, I sense the hesitation. People would rather not speak up. But with just a little coaxing, someone does speak up and others follow. They say what’s on their minds. We benefit from their points of view and they have, perhaps, experienced an act of courage whose Impact lasts long after the event.
Mark Ketchum did this with brand and advertising agency teams. He refused to accept an “agency point of view”that allows the opinions of individuals to be hidden behind a single, unilateral recommendation.
Mark said:
I go around the room and make everyone in attendance declare their personal point of view on a storyboard, a concept, a selling line or whatever. I know this has made an impact, because my long-term agency partners play back the positive effect this has had in cutting through the politics — and sometimes dysfunctional hierarchies — in the world of advertising.
It does more than that. Motivating others to act courageously becomes habit-forming and character-building.
Acting bravely is easier said than done, of course. Making the right decision — especially what could be a “gutsy”one — can be very lonely. You’re going against the grain; against the majority. You believe you’re right, but you can’t be sure. In a speech he gave at Harvard in 1886, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. described in stern terms the role of the leader when facing the toughest decisions:
Only when you have worked alone, when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude and isolation like that which surrounds a dying man, and then entrust [yourself] to your own unshaken will, then only will you have achieved.
Decisions that rise to that level of tension will not happen often, but happen they will. And it is only with courage that they will be made well. As Edmond Burke, the 18th-century British statesman said, “The only thing necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to remain silent.” 2
The choice is ours:
Laurent Philippe, who led our business magnificently in Morocco, then Russia, then Greater China, and who is now leading our Western Europe Market Development Organization, recently shared this recollection with me:
It was October 1998 in Moscow, only a few weeks after the dramatic devaluation of the Russian currency. You and I had been store checking the whole day. Moscow was gloomy, as only Moscow can be at the early approach of winter. I recall we did not see a single P&G shopper that day. We had abruptly priced up to recover dollar sales, but local ruble salaries had been kept under close check by the government. I was pretty depressed. But you were forward looking, as always. First, you bought a tube of Blend-a-Med for yourself, gently pretending that you had forgotten your toothpaste from home. So we had at least one P&G purchase decision made that day. More importantly, several times you expressed to the group your strong conviction that the leading brand equities and share positions
we had built in Russia before the crisis would serve us well, and that after the crisis we would emerge stronger than ever before. As we now know, this is exactly what happened. What a great lesson of courage and of leadership you gave me on that very day!
What I said to Laurent and our team that day wasn’t calculated. It wasn’t a special intervention. In fact, I didn’t recall it at all until Laurent brought it to my attention more than six years later. All of which can serve to remind us that often our most meaningful acts of leadership are spontaneous, drawing on our commitment to service and to our deepest-held values of courage and persistence.
While acts of courage are intensely personal, we can nurture and encourage courageous acts from others, as well. I often ask individuals participating in a large group for their personal point of view. For a moment, I sense the hesitation. People would rather not speak up. But with just a little coaxing, someone does speak up and others follow. They say what’s on their minds. We benefit from their points of view and they have, perhaps, experienced an act of courage whose Impact lasts long after the event.
Mark Ketchum did this with brand and advertising agency teams. He refused to accept an “agency point of view”that allows the opinions of individuals to be hidden behind a single, unilateral recommendation.
Mark said:
I go around the room and make everyone in attendance declare their personal point of view on a storyboard, a concept, a selling line or whatever. I know this has made an impact, because my long-term agency partners play back the positive effect this has had in cutting through the politics — and sometimes dysfunctional hierarchies — in the world of advertising.
It does more than that. Motivating others to act courageously becomes habit-forming and character-building.
Acting bravely is easier said than done, of course. Making the right decision — especially what could be a “gutsy”one — can be very lonely. You’re going against the grain; against the majority. You believe you’re right, but you can’t be sure. In a speech he gave at Harvard in 1886, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. described in stern terms the role of the leader when facing the toughest decisions:
Only when you have worked alone, when you have felt around you a black gulf of solitude and isolation like that which surrounds a dying man, and then entrust [yourself] to your own unshaken will, then only will you have achieved.
Decisions that rise to that level of tension will not happen often, but happen they will. And it is only with courage that they will be made well. As Edmond Burke, the 18th-century British statesman said, “The only thing necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to remain silent.” 2
The choice is ours:
- Will I speak up? Do I act on behalf of what I know is right? Or, do I opt to go with the flow, even if I believe
the flow is going in the wrong direction? - In a meeting when I hear something unfair or inappropriate being said about another person, do I speak upor let it pass?
• If I see misalignment among people who need to work together to achieve a goal, do I do my best to correct it? Or do I let the situation pass in stony silence, hoping somehow it will correct itself, as unlikely as that may be?
In making choices like these, we draw on the deepest foundations of our character, which have been built over the years through countless, individual decisions. No one of them may seem that important, but collectively they are the cornerstone we draw on as we make the most significant decisions in our lives and careers.
This was certainly true for me. I drew on the lessons learned from past decisions as I made every major decision —whether it was changing an organizational design, expanding a major brand, entering a new country, or handling a weighty personnel matter.
I have always come back to three simple checks in order to test if my decision is a correct and courageous one:
This was certainly true for me. I drew on the lessons learned from past decisions as I made every major decision —whether it was changing an organizational design, expanding a major brand, entering a new country, or handling a weighty personnel matter.
I have always come back to three simple checks in order to test if my decision is a correct and courageous one:
- Is it consistent with my own vision, my beliefs and my understanding of the facts?
- Am I doing what I believe is morally and ethically right? Does it feel right? (If it doesn’t feel right, it probably
isn’t.) - And finally, would I feel comfortable telling my wife, Francie, and my children what I have done and why I have done it
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This blog is drawn from a chapter of my book, "What Really Matters"
