Colloquy Podcast: Can We Learn to Have Courage?

Ranjay Gulati, PhD ’93, an expert on leadership strategy and organizational growth, has thought a lot about courage. It is not fearlessness, writes the Paul R. Lawrence MBA Class of 1942 Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School in his new book, How to Be Bold, but the ability to make sense of situations in helpful ways and also see ourselves as strong, capable people who can control our destinies. Most of all, he says that courage is a learned behavior, and he is here to put us on the path to developing a courageous mindset.

When you were a teenager, your mother bought a piece of land that suddenly became very valuable. A developer wanted it. She told him it was not for sale. I wonder if you could describe what happened next.

The story actually was one I had tried to forget because, as you will discover, you will see why I wanted to forget it. It was buried deep in the recesses of my brain.

I was home from boarding school one weekend, and a gentleman came to the gate. My mother had a security guard at the gate, and he came to me and said, “Somebody is insisting on seeing your mom. It is the weekend, and she does not usually see guests. Can you talk to him?”

I went up to the gentleman. He was from the developer, and he was insisting on seeing my mom. I said, “Look, she is not going to see you. She does not want to sell the land.” I knew about this.

He said, “Can you tell her that we have been bothering her? I know this is the last time we will ever come. Five minutes. That is all we want. Just five minutes. The last chance.”

So I went to my mom, and she said, “Okay, bring him in. But you stand at the door, keep time, and after five minutes, you take him out.”

I brought him in. He was very respectful, a big, burly gentleman in a blazer. He sat down opposite my mom in the living room, on a sofa seat, and immediately took out from his pocket a blank signed check and a piece of paper. He said, “Ma’am, we are not here to negotiate. We just want the land. You write in the amount—whatever you want.”

My mom said, “Look, there is no more land for sale in that part of town, and that is exactly where I want to be. I want to have a design studio there. It is enough space for me. I do not care about the money. It is not about the money. I do not want to sell. I am sorry.”

Immediately, his demeanor changed from polite to aggressive. He said, “I am not leaving here until you sign this paper.”

My mother said, “Excuse me. Please leave now.”

At this point, he leaned back in his seat. His blazer, which had been facing forward, pulled back, and he showed both me and my mom a gun tucked into his waist very deliberately. He was trying to show us that he had a gun.

I was at the door. I was frozen. I was thinking, What should I do? Should I call the guard? Should I call the cook? Should I jump on the guy? Maybe he is bluffing. Maybe it is a fake gun. Maybe it is empty. Maybe I should wait. Maybe it is premature for me to get into a fight with him. What will happen next? I was thinking through all the scenarios I could.

My mother, immediately, without hesitation—five feet, one inch tall—leaped out of the sofa as he walked around the table and slapped him across the face. She said, “How dare you come into my house? First you try to bully me, and now you try to threaten me to take away my land. Get out of here now!”

Now he was rattled because the security guard heard the commotion and came running in. Her cook came in from the kitchen, and he was surrounded by people. He ran out of there, leaving his checkbook behind.

After this was over, I asked my mom, “Mom, that was crazy.”

She said, “Why?”

I said, “Didn’t you see he had a gun?”

She said, “Yes.”

I said, “Weren’t you scared?”

She said, “Yes.”

Then she said something to me that stuck in my head: “I was scared, but just because you are scared does not mean you do nothing. Just because you are scared does not mean you do nothing.”

I was a little ashamed of myself because I was fourteen. By then, I already felt like I was a man. I should have been protecting my mother. I felt I had really failed there, so I tried to bury the story. I never thought about it. I never talked about it.

But it was there in the back of my mind: Why are some people like her able to resource themselves in a moment of uncertainty, which naturally leads to fear, and somehow transcend that fear and take action, while others are typically frozen, as I was?

It took me a long time to understand that, and there is some really great social science research that helps us understand some of these behaviors.

Then [my mother] said something to me that stuck in my head: “I was scared, but just because you are scared does not mean you do nothing.”

The title of your book is How to Be Bold. That made me wonder, first of all, how do you define boldness? And second, is it the same as courage?

There are so many words we use to capture this phenomenon. Let me define the phenomenon first, and then we can think about what words fit.

I always thought of courage, guts, or being bold as the absence of fear because I was an avid consumer of fiction, Hollywood movies, and Bollywood movies. When is the last time you saw James Bond say, “I am scared to get out of this plane without a parachute, but I am going to do it anyway”? There is never an admission of fear. If anything, these characters look confident and carefree.

Think about Rambo, the Terminator, Ethan Hunt, Jason Bourne, Clint Eastwood, or a Wild West movie. These characters always present themselves as cool as cucumbers, unfazed by what is happening around them, and there is never an admission of fear because fear is a sign of weakness. It is an admission that “I am not capable.”

Nelson Mandela said it really well when he said courage is not the absence of fear; it is resourcing yourself in the face of fear and usually toward a noble cause.

That is how I define courage and boldness, which I treat as synonymous in my book. In my mind, it is taking action in the face of fear toward a noble cause. Now, what is a noble cause is debatable. Noble for one is not noble for another. That is where I try to be as value-neutral as I can. I wanted to focus on courage, not on some other larger debate.

You have this formula for becoming more courageous: the “Nine Cs.” I would like us first to talk about those a little bit and how they are grounded in social science. Then maybe we can talk about some of the case studies in the book and how they exemplify this formula.

The first six of those chapters, where I talk about the Cs, are about individual courage. The last three are about organizational courage. I study organizations, so I had to have something about organizations and courage as well.

But the first six are really about individual courage. A quick preamble as I get into the Cs is that it is important to understand that courage is action in the face of fear. Fear is a very important construct in this story because what you are doing is taking action in spite of fear.

For thousands of years, human beings have prayed to a higher power to calm themselves down, to reduce the sense of fear. You either try to dampen your fear, or you do what the lion did in The Wizard of Oz: take action in spite of fear.

I will start with the first one. The first one talks about driving down fear. How do I dampen my fear? I already mentioned that, for the longest time, humankind has prayed to a higher power, and it works. I interviewed some Ukrainian commandos operating behind enemy lines. Prayer and ritual are part of life there.

I also looked at what [US Airways] Captain Chesley Sullenberger did [in 2009, when landing flight 1549 on the Hudson River, saving all 155 passengers]. The first thing he did when he had to land the plane on the Hudson was make a checklist. All pilots love checklists. It turns out checklists are a calming device. They are a way to dial down the emotional response because you are now focused on the task at hand, the list of things you must do. It is a very powerful way to create what is called emotional regulation.

There is a body of research on emotional regulation that looks at these kinds of tactics. Modularizing and breaking things down is one of them. Another thing people use is ritual. I did not know this until I wrote this book, but Adele, the famous singer, is terrified of public singing. What does she do? She has a ritual. She looks at Celine Dion’s picture before she sings. Celine Dion is her hero, and it calms her down.

Athletics is full of this. Katie Ledecky, the famous swimmer, recites her grandmother’s name. It calms her down. I mentioned the rituals in Ukraine with the commandos before they go off. So the first C is really emotion regulation, which I call calm.

Nelson Mandela said it really well when he said courage is not the absence of fear; it is resourcing yourself in the face of fear and usually toward a noble cause.

Let’s look at another one: confidence. This comes from research done by Stanford professor Albert Bandura. Bandura, in some ways, I think, was trying to replicate what two British psychologists had done during World War II. They were studying perhaps the most dangerous occupations in the British Army at that time: paratroopers and bomb-disposal squads. They were trying to see how these soldiers stayed calm. It was classic training and exposure therapy. The more they were slowly exposed to dangers in training, the more they were numbed to the dangers and able to deal with them.

That is what airlines do with passengers who are terrified of flying: classic exposure therapy. Bandura recruited students who were terrified of snakes and said, “I am going to make you look at pictures and slowly expose you to snakes. Over time, you will get comfortable with the snake, and maybe you will hold one.” He was going to make them hold a corn snake. These are big snakes. They do not bite, but they look scary.

Many students dropped out during the course of the study. But the ones who stuck around later not only said they could hold a snake; they said it had given them a sense of confidence—general confidence, not just confidence about snakes. It was about their lives. If they could deal with the snake, they could deal with anything. Bandura called this self-efficacy. Since I had a C, I call it confidence.

I have talked about calm. I have talked about confidence. I will share another one with you. This one is the hardest one to explain, but I will give it a shot. I call it conviction.

Most of us hold on to some beliefs that are sacred to us, meaning that if they are violated, we will do anything, even at our own physical or emotional cost. Protecting my family, for example. Some of us have principles so dear to us that we will do anything to protect them.

Alexei Navalny was poisoned in Russia as a dissident. He was evacuated to Germany and had a miraculous recovery. He had a wife and two kids. What did he do? He turned around, got on a plane, and went back to Russia, knowing they would arrest him and ship him to Siberia, which is exactly what they did. He knew that he might die, but he said, “I do not have a choice.”

So conviction becomes another piece of the puzzle. If you go back to Max Weber, the famous sociologist, he said human behavior is triggered by two sorts of sentiments. One is utilitarian, which is cost-benefit analysis. We do the math. The other is interpretive, meaning. We look at the world through a lens of meaning and identity. What does this mean for me? What am I supposed to do?

Even Captain Sullenberger, in an interview afterward, when Katie Couric asked him, said, “To me, at that moment, it felt like my entire life up to that moment had been preparation for handling that moment.”

Suddenly feeling, “I have to do something,” morally compelled—that is conviction. That is a third C.

Let’s talk about some of the individuals you mention in the book. You say these folks developed certain patterned ways of framing meaning that made fear seem less palpable or even largely irrelevant. You just talked about conviction. You also talk about the people who prevented the reactors from melting down during Japan’s 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. How did they embody this way of framing?

Linking it back to fear, what I learned is that these people realized something else matters more than fear. Something else matters more than fear.

Take the example of Fukushima. We all think of Fukushima as the Fukushima meltdown. That is the Fukushima Daiichi plant, which had a meltdown. It took global resources to contain that meltdown, and it will take twenty-five-odd years to clean it up.

It happened because the boundary walls were more than twenty feet high, and nothing had ever happened higher than that. Then the tsunami brought in fifty-five-foot-high water.

What nobody talks about is the other nuclear complex eight miles away, the Fukushima Daini plant, which had the same exact damage and the same exact countdown. They had a finite amount of time to get the cooling system back up, or else they would have a meltdown too. If they had had a meltdown too, I do not think we had the global resources to contain two simultaneous meltdowns in two complexes. That would have been catastrophic.

What did Mr. Masuda do? First of all, he did not know what to do. He called headquarters. They said, “We do not know what to do. Good luck.”

So he put a whiteboard in the emergency response room, where there were about three hundred men. They identified themselves because they could not reach their families, who were living in the neighborhood. The cell towers were down, and they did not know what to do.

He wrote on the whiteboard, “What do we know?” They wrote down what they knew: cooling systems shut, power lines down, sensors down, and X hours to get this thing back up or else meltdown. Those were the facts.

Then: “What do we need to know?” They made a list of what they needed to know. He asked for volunteers to go outside because the feeds were not working, and they did not have the data they needed. Volunteers were willing to wear protective suits and go outside. Everybody raised their hand. He sent out a crew of six.

They came back with good news and bad news. The good news was that the water levels had receded, so the place was no longer flooded. The bad news was that all power systems were off, cooling systems were off, and no power lines were working.

They took stock. What do we do? Where might we have power? They needed to find power. Without power, they were toast. They could not do anything. They mapped out where power might be. The next round of volunteers went out, and one unit came back with live power.

Now the question was: How are we going to create a little extension cord of sorts and connect it to the cooling systems for all the reactors? Where are we going to find cables? They contacted headquarters to help drop cables. Then they sent teams to look for cables.

After every iteration, they wrote down on the board what they knew and what they needed to know. Step by step, they had to figure out which reactors needed the cooling system running first because they were heating up at different speeds and were different models. They prioritized which ones needed to be turned on first. One by one, they got every single reactor up in time, with just hours to spare.

There is a very famous organizational psychologist named Karl Weick, who studied firefighters and others and wrote about a concept called sensemaking. In times of uncertainty and fear, what does a firefighter do? Firefighters do not have the luxury of waiting outside the building and gathering all the information. They look at the outside. They may form some hypotheses. Then they go in. As soon as they go in, they gather more data, revise their hypotheses, update, and then go one more step in. Through this iterative process, they work their way into the building.

Weick calls this “acting your way into knowing.” Sometimes you cannot know before you act. You have to act your way into knowing. You see this in entrepreneurship. A lot of entrepreneurs do not have all the data.

In today’s world, whether in business or the world at large, do we know what is going to happen with AI? Do we know what is going to happen with geopolitics? Do we know what is going to happen with the environment? We do not know. Freezing is not the right answer. Sometimes doing nothing is more risky than trying something and failing.

What I learned in this example was how they took action step by step and acted their way into knowing. There was also moral conviction. They understood that the survival of their families, but really that whole island and a lot more, hinged on them.

I am wondering how, in a practical way, people can cultivate courage in their own lives. In particular, how can we build our boldness muscles? Do courageous acts necessarily have to be life-risking and dramatic? Do we have to save the island of Japan from a horrible meltdown?

That is a great question. As an author, when you write a book, you start getting emails and LinkedIn messages from people you do not know. One message I got from somebody really stuck in my head. This person said, “I have come to realize that most of us are living our fears, not our dreams.”

It also dawned on me that fear is a primitive, paralyzing emotion. Our ancestors were cowards. They are the ones who survived. They ran for cover when there was a dangerous animal. They were not running toward the animal. They were running away from it. In some ways, cowardice is the default human response. Survival is hardwired in us.

So many of my own actions were probably driven by fear. Actually, not probably—I know they were driven by fear. If there is a way for us to transcend our fear, it can be liberating and allow us to think about things in a more objective way because fear hijacks the amygdala, the primitive brain.

How do we become more intentional? How do we become more deliberate?

There is a reason why many observers, including Aristotle and Maya Angelou, have described courage as the master virtue that unlocks all the other virtues. If you want to have any other virtues, you have to start with courage to unlock the others. I think there is some truth to that.

My thought is that there are some very simple things: the science of calm. How do I calm myself down in the face of fear? How do I build up my inner can-do mindset, my inner confidence—the kind many entrepreneurs seem to have, and my mother had for sure? How do I learn to use comprehension as a tool? I am not going to leap into the unknown; I am going to take steps into the unknown. How do I build my own moral conviction? What do I believe? What do I stand for? What are some things that are sacred to me? What is my purpose? What are my values and beliefs?

All these things create an arsenal or toolkit that allows us to take on fear rather than be paralyzed by it. That was the learning I had from seeing and listening to these stories.

In today’s world, whether in business or the world at large, do we know what is going to happen with AI? Do we know what is going to happen with geopolitics? Do we know what is going to happen with the environment? We do not know. Freezing is not the right answer. Sometimes doing nothing is more risky than trying something and failing.

You also wrote in the book, “If there was ever a time to enhance our ability to control or manage fear and show more everyday courage, this is it.” Why is boldness so important now? And where do you find it these days when you look around?

We are in an uncertainty crisis right now. We have a lot of uncertainty around us. In these times of uncertainty, it is really easy to get paralyzed. These are precisely the moments when you have to say to yourself, “How do I deal with the fear I am facing, and how do I take action?”

It is not easy. Many of the examples of courage I gave seem to have come at no cost because the outcome was a good one. But some people paid the price. Alexei Navalny died. It is not always a good ending.

As a professor of business, I also see many illustrations of this in a business context. I teach an MBA class on business turnaround and transformation. Some of these companies are absolutely failing.

I will give you one from Boston: Boston Scientific. In 2009, Boston Scientific did what is considered the second-worst acquisition in modern history, the worst being AOL Time Warner. Boston Scientific got into a bidding war and bought Guidant for a record sum of $28 billion, though they themselves were worth $27 billion.

They bought a company they thought would be their future growth, and it turned out to be a complete disaster. They had FDA recalls, quality issues, and regulatory issues. The collective market cap dropped from around $56 billion or $60 billion to $8 billion.

They offered the job to a new CEO, Mike Mahoney. Mike hired a consulting firm to advise him on how bad the situation was and whether he should take the job. The consultants came back and told him it was really bad, essentially unsalvageable, and that he should not take the job.

He took it.

The case I wrote and teach is about how Mike turned a failing company with an $8 billion market cap, going down fast, into a $150 billion market cap company. In medical devices, Boston Scientific is now considered a juggernaut.

How do you do that? How do you get people built up? In business, they love sports language, so they call it the winning spirit. How do you create that winning spirit? You see instances where a leader steps up. Why would Mike take this job when he was told categorically, “Do not take it, Mike”? But he still took it, and he faced down impossible odds.

Or Anne Mulcahy, who became CEO of Xerox many decades ago, when it was an almost bankrupt company, and turned it around. We have examples in business and outside business where leaders step up. I think the world needs leaders like that.