Value(s) by Mark Carney Building a Better World for All
What's it about?
Value(s) (2021) examines how we’ve allowed economic value and social values to become fatally blurred, transforming from a market economy into a market society where essential workers and environmental protection are systematically undervalued while financial speculation is rewarded. It demonstrates how embedding sustainability, solidarity, and responsibility into all decision-making can channel market dynamism to turn society’s greatest challenges into opportunities.
Ever wondered why we live in a world where essential workers earn poverty wages while financial speculators command fortunes? Well, what you’re really thinking about is one of society’s most perplexing contradictions: how we’ve systematically inverted our understanding of value.
Drawing on insights from Aristotle and Adam Smith to contemporary behavioral economics, this lesson reveals how our embrace of subjective value theory has created a system that routinely undervalues care work, environmental stewardship, and community building while celebrating financial extraction. Using the climate crisis as a compelling case study, it demonstrates how market-based valuations systematically fail to price what matters most for human flourishing.
What’s the way forward? It’s not in better market mechanisms but in values-based leadership grounded in purpose, perspective, and genuine stewardship.
Value occupies a paradoxical place in modern society. Water sustains all life yet costs almost nothing, while diamonds serve no essential purpose but command enormous prices. This paradox has troubled thinkers from Plato to Scottish economist Adam Smith – and we still haven’t solved it.
This disconnect plays out everywhere you look. Amazon ranks among the world’s most financially valuable corporations despite its notorious tax avoidance and environmental destruction. Meanwhile, the Amazon rainforest – which regulates our climate and harbors incalculable biodiversity – appears worthless in corporate ledgers until loggers convert its trees into financial units. Same name, wildly different values.
The pattern repeated itself during our recent global crisis. In 2019, economists dismissed care workers and nurses as too unproductive to merit higher wages. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, citizens applauded these same workers nightly, suddenly recognizing their labor as more valuable than any higher-paid profession. Yet this heartfelt recognition never translated into better compensation. We clapped, but we didn’t pay.
To understand this paradox, we must first distinguish between “value” and “values” – two words that sound similar but mean very different things. Values guide behavior through moral principles like courtesy, integrity, and respect for human dignity. Value, on the other hand, is how we measure what we perceive something to deserve, whether that something is an object or someone’s labor. Here’s the crucial bit: this value is always context-dependent. Shakespeare’s desperate Richard III captured this perfectly when he cried, “My kingdom for a horse!” His entire realm suddenly mattered less than escape, proving that circumstances determine worth.
This brings us to how economists think about value. Economic theory recognizes three distinct types. Intrinsic value reflects inherent worth – clean air sustains human life regardless of price tags. Use value captures practical utility – hammers drive nails whether they cost five or 50 pounds. Exchange value represents market price – what buyers actually pay at any given moment. The crisis emerges when exchange value dominates the other two, drowning out what really matters.
But there’s another crucial distinction that helps explain our predicament. Economists differentiate between value creation and value extraction – and the difference is night and day. Teachers educating children, engineers designing safer infrastructure, and farmers growing food create genuine value that benefits everyone. By contrast, predatory lenders enriching themselves while bankrupting communities extract value without creating any benefit. Pharmaceutical companies pricing life-saving medicines beyond reach while contributing no new research simply extract pure profit from human desperation.
Here’s where we’ve gone wrong: modern society equates market prices with intrinsic worth, confusing what markets value with what humanity actually needs. This fundamental confusion leads us to systematically undervalue care work, environmental stewardship, and community building while celebrating financial speculation and resource extraction. Somewhere along the way, markets became our masters rather than our tools – and that’s a relationship we desperately need to reverse.
Throughout history, thoughtful people have grappled with what makes something valuable. And their insights help explain how we got into our current crisis, where markets price everything backwards – valuing financial speculation over care work, and corporate profits over environmental protection.
Greek philosophers like Aristotle developed sophisticated theories that distinguished between natural and artificial wealth. Natural wealth consisted of things genuinely needed for a good life – food, shelter, community relationships. Artificial wealth meant accumulating money and possessions beyond any reasonable need. For Aristotle, true value lay in fulfilling human potential and contributing to the polis – the common good that binds society together. He fiercely criticized what he called chrematistics, the art of making money for its own sake, warning that this pursuit corrupts society’s moral fabric. Money, he argued, should serve human flourishing, not dominate it.
Centuries later, Bernardo Davanzati, a sixteenth-century Italian economist, became among the first to systematically explore how scarcity creates value. He observed that abundance makes things cheap while scarcity makes them dear – grain costs little during harvest but much during famine. But here’s what made Davanzati brilliant: he argued that this market mechanism often contradicts human welfare. His insight that markets can work against human well-being predates modern behavioral economics by centuries, yet we’ve somehow forgotten this wisdom.
Adam Smith, though famous for his “invisible hand,” spent most of his career arguing that markets must be embedded in moral frameworks. He wrote extensively about how human sympathy and moral sentiment should constrain economic behavior. His water-diamond paradox wasn’t merely an interesting observation – it was a fundamental critique showing how markets fail to price what matters most for human flourishing. Smith believed that sympathy and moral sentiment should guide economic behavior, not pure self-interest. The man we’ve turned into capitalism’s patron saint actually warned against its excesses.
Karl Marx built on these insights with devastating clarity. Under capitalism, he argued, use value – what things actually do for people – becomes subordinated to exchange value – what they can be sold for. This “commodity fetishism” obscures the social relationships behind production, making exploitation appear natural rather than constructed. Marx revealed how capitalism transforms human labor itself into a commodity, alienating workers from their creative potential and reducing them to mere factors of production.
These thinkers understood what we’ve forgotten: that how we define value shapes everything else. Their warnings about subordinating human welfare to market mechanisms explain precisely how we arrived at today’s crisis – where essential workers earn little while financial speculators grow increasingly wealthy, and life-sustaining forests matter less than logging profits.
Economic theories of value have undergone a fundamental shift over time. They moved from objective approaches that tied value to factors of production toward subjective theories where value becomes context-dependent, determined purely by individual preference. Today, it’s widely assumed that value is always reflected in market price. Worth has become increasingly connected with society’s perceived values rather than genuine contribution. Additionally, the crucial distinction between productive and unproductive rent-seeking value has basically collapsed – value is value, whether it generates or extracts. This dominant approach to subjective values creates serious consequences.
Market failures reveal the theory’s flaws. Subjective value theory assumes an idealized world of perfect competition, commodity goods, complete markets, and rational consumers. Reality tells a different story. When only a few companies control a market – like Google dominating search or Amazon controlling e-commerce – prices become too high and production insufficient. Pharmaceutical giants charge thousands for insulin that costs pennies to produce. When markets are incomplete or collapse under even small shocks, widespread damage follows. The 2008 financial crisis devastated asset prices and jobs when mortgage markets collapsed. Energy markets routinely fail during crises, leaving vulnerable people unable to heat their homes. Adam Smith stressed that markets need fairness and morality to function correctly. Subjective value theory undermines this ability and denies the truth that social capital must be cultivated for economic capital to grow.
Human frailties expose another weakness. Behavioral science shows that as consumers and market participants, we’re far from the rational people economic theory assumes. We make decisions based on emotions, follow herd mentality during market bubbles, and systematically undervalue future benefits. The dot-com crash and housing bubble demonstrated how irrational exuberance drives markets away from any reasonable valuation. People consistently choose immediate gratification over long-term welfare, explaining why sustainable products struggle despite environmental concerns.
National welfare suffers under this approach. How we define value shapes which activities society views as productive, influencing public policies and private priorities. The subjective approach claims neutrality by making everything price comparable. But it fails catastrophically when measuring welfare and intangible contributions. GDP doesn’t include the invaluable work of full-time parents and carers who nurture future generations, or the economic benefits of robust social welfare systems that reduce crime, improve health outcomes, and create social stability. It measures utility, not welfare, ignoring unpriced outputs entirely. Moreover, it treats all money equally – £1000 means nothing to Mark Zuckerberg but transforms someone on welfare, yet both count identically in economic calculations.
These failures are fundamental flaws in how subjective value theory understands human society. When we reduce everything to individual preferences and market prices, we lose sight of collective needs and shared values. The path forward requires returning to objective measures that recognize what genuinely sustains human flourishing – solidarity, fairness, responsibility, and care for future generations.
From the global financial crash to the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s no shortage of case studies proving how acutely the subjective value approach has failed contemporary society. Let’s examine just one: the climate crisis.
Since the Industrial Revolution began around 1760, humanity has released over 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. What started with coal-powered steam engines has accelerated exponentially – we’ve emitted more carbon since 1990 than in all previous human history combined. Today’s 36 billion tons of annual emissions break down roughly as follows: energy generation accounts for 25 percent, agriculture and land use 24 percent, industry 21 percent, transport 14 percent, and buildings 6 percent. Net zero by 2050 isn’t political theatre – it’s the scientific minimum to prevent warming beyond 1.5°C, the threshold beyond which feedback loops may trigger runaway climate change.
The consequences of inaction are mathematically brutal. Current trajectories lead to 3–4°C warming, rendering vast agricultural regions uninhabitable, displacing over a billion people, and triggering ecosystem collapse across multiple continents. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates economic damages at 10–25 percent of global GDP by 2100 – equivalent to experiencing the 2008 financial crisis every single year.
Yet measuring climate costs exposes the fatal flaw in subjective valuation. Market-priced damages seem manageable – hurricanes cost $100 billion here, droughts reduce agricultural output by 2 percent there. But climate change systematically destroys assets that markets cannot price. When coral reefs die, we lose ecosystem services worth an estimated $375 billion annually in coastal protection, fisheries, and tourism. When communities fragment under climate stress, we lose social capital built over generations – the trust networks, local knowledge, and collective resilience that no market can recreate.
This represents the tragedy that the next generation will face. Today’s fossil fuel executives optimizing quarterly profits won’t witness 2080’s climate chaos. Corporate discount rates of 8–12 percent annually make investments beyond ten years essentially worthless in present value calculations. Monetary policy horizons extend two-to-three years maximum. Credit cycles peak at roughly a decade. All systematically undervalue climate action.
Subjective value theory tells us that if something isn’t priced, it has no economic value – so rational actors treat atmospheric absorption capacity as infinite and free. Each corporation finds it economically sensible to emit rather than pay for reductions, yet collective emissions guarantee system collapse. Natural gas company ExxonMobil’s internal climate models proved remarkably accurate while the company publicly funded climate denial – this wasn’t corporate evil but rational profit maximization within a value system that cannot price planetary habitability.
Subjective value theory can’t solve climate change because it can’t price what matters most: the habitability of Earth itself, the stability of civilizations, the continuation of species. When accounting systems treat the atmosphere as a free dumping ground, markets will use it as one until the entire system collapses.
As the climate crisis illustrates, our wholehearted embrace of market values has robbed society of its capacity to express what truly matters. Is the prognosis completely bleak? Can we find our way out of this impasse?
Yes – by adopting values-led leadership. Note: values, not value. This approach rests on five key attributes: purpose, perspective, clarity, competence, and humility.
Purpose defines what an organization stands for, whether it’s a company, charity, or government. Google’s purpose is organizing the world’s information; the World Bank aims to end extreme poverty. Purpose should anchor every goal, strategy, and decision. It connects directly to trust because sticking to purpose demonstrates integrity, which builds trustworthiness. True understanding of purpose comes with recognizing that leaders are stewards – they must hand purpose on to others. A leader assumes responsibility, not power.
Perspective means taking a view that encompasses both horizon and periphery. Pope Francis exemplified this beautifully when he reminded us that “we are all in the same storm, but not all in the same boat.” This perspective recognizes that while we face shared challenges, our circumstances differ dramatically. Leaders need to act as interdependent communities, not independent individuals competing for advantage.
Clarity requires focus – being present in the moment and learning from experience. Effective leaders simplify the complicated, reduce complex problems to manageable parts, and communicate essentials clearly. During COVID-19, leaders like Jacinda Ardern and Angela Merkel demonstrated this perfectly. They laid out complexity honestly, spoke with genuine empathy, and stuck to key messages without wavering. They struck that crucial balance between realism about challenges and optimism about outcomes.
Competence means strategy matters, but execution proves crucial. This doesn’t require getting everything right, but it does mean getting more right than wrong. Competence becomes vital during hard decisions. When John F. Kennedy faced the Cuban Missile Crisis, he demonstrated competence by consulting widely, considering multiple options carefully, and ultimately choosing a naval quarantine that avoided both appeasement and nuclear war – threading an impossibly narrow needle through patient, methodical decision-making.
Humility might not be the first word that comes to mind when thinking of leadership, but the ability to learn and admit mistakes is essential. Humble leaders acknowledge uncertainty, seek diverse perspectives, and change course when evidence demands it. They understand that owning errors strengthens rather than weakens their authority.
Value(s) (2021) examines how we’ve allowed economic value and social values to become fatally blurred, transforming from a market economy into a market society where essential workers and environmental protection are systematically undervalued while financial speculation is rewarded. It demonstrates how embedding sustainability, solidarity, and responsibility into all decision-making can channel market dynamism to turn society’s greatest challenges into opportunities.
Ever wondered why we live in a world where essential workers earn poverty wages while financial speculators command fortunes? Well, what you’re really thinking about is one of society’s most perplexing contradictions: how we’ve systematically inverted our understanding of value.
Drawing on insights from Aristotle and Adam Smith to contemporary behavioral economics, this lesson reveals how our embrace of subjective value theory has created a system that routinely undervalues care work, environmental stewardship, and community building while celebrating financial extraction. Using the climate crisis as a compelling case study, it demonstrates how market-based valuations systematically fail to price what matters most for human flourishing.
What’s the way forward? It’s not in better market mechanisms but in values-based leadership grounded in purpose, perspective, and genuine stewardship.
Value occupies a paradoxical place in modern society. Water sustains all life yet costs almost nothing, while diamonds serve no essential purpose but command enormous prices. This paradox has troubled thinkers from Plato to Scottish economist Adam Smith – and we still haven’t solved it.
This disconnect plays out everywhere you look. Amazon ranks among the world’s most financially valuable corporations despite its notorious tax avoidance and environmental destruction. Meanwhile, the Amazon rainforest – which regulates our climate and harbors incalculable biodiversity – appears worthless in corporate ledgers until loggers convert its trees into financial units. Same name, wildly different values.
The pattern repeated itself during our recent global crisis. In 2019, economists dismissed care workers and nurses as too unproductive to merit higher wages. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, citizens applauded these same workers nightly, suddenly recognizing their labor as more valuable than any higher-paid profession. Yet this heartfelt recognition never translated into better compensation. We clapped, but we didn’t pay.
To understand this paradox, we must first distinguish between “value” and “values” – two words that sound similar but mean very different things. Values guide behavior through moral principles like courtesy, integrity, and respect for human dignity. Value, on the other hand, is how we measure what we perceive something to deserve, whether that something is an object or someone’s labor. Here’s the crucial bit: this value is always context-dependent. Shakespeare’s desperate Richard III captured this perfectly when he cried, “My kingdom for a horse!” His entire realm suddenly mattered less than escape, proving that circumstances determine worth.
This brings us to how economists think about value. Economic theory recognizes three distinct types. Intrinsic value reflects inherent worth – clean air sustains human life regardless of price tags. Use value captures practical utility – hammers drive nails whether they cost five or 50 pounds. Exchange value represents market price – what buyers actually pay at any given moment. The crisis emerges when exchange value dominates the other two, drowning out what really matters.
But there’s another crucial distinction that helps explain our predicament. Economists differentiate between value creation and value extraction – and the difference is night and day. Teachers educating children, engineers designing safer infrastructure, and farmers growing food create genuine value that benefits everyone. By contrast, predatory lenders enriching themselves while bankrupting communities extract value without creating any benefit. Pharmaceutical companies pricing life-saving medicines beyond reach while contributing no new research simply extract pure profit from human desperation.
Here’s where we’ve gone wrong: modern society equates market prices with intrinsic worth, confusing what markets value with what humanity actually needs. This fundamental confusion leads us to systematically undervalue care work, environmental stewardship, and community building while celebrating financial speculation and resource extraction. Somewhere along the way, markets became our masters rather than our tools – and that’s a relationship we desperately need to reverse.
Throughout history, thoughtful people have grappled with what makes something valuable. And their insights help explain how we got into our current crisis, where markets price everything backwards – valuing financial speculation over care work, and corporate profits over environmental protection.
Greek philosophers like Aristotle developed sophisticated theories that distinguished between natural and artificial wealth. Natural wealth consisted of things genuinely needed for a good life – food, shelter, community relationships. Artificial wealth meant accumulating money and possessions beyond any reasonable need. For Aristotle, true value lay in fulfilling human potential and contributing to the polis – the common good that binds society together. He fiercely criticized what he called chrematistics, the art of making money for its own sake, warning that this pursuit corrupts society’s moral fabric. Money, he argued, should serve human flourishing, not dominate it.
Centuries later, Bernardo Davanzati, a sixteenth-century Italian economist, became among the first to systematically explore how scarcity creates value. He observed that abundance makes things cheap while scarcity makes them dear – grain costs little during harvest but much during famine. But here’s what made Davanzati brilliant: he argued that this market mechanism often contradicts human welfare. His insight that markets can work against human well-being predates modern behavioral economics by centuries, yet we’ve somehow forgotten this wisdom.
Adam Smith, though famous for his “invisible hand,” spent most of his career arguing that markets must be embedded in moral frameworks. He wrote extensively about how human sympathy and moral sentiment should constrain economic behavior. His water-diamond paradox wasn’t merely an interesting observation – it was a fundamental critique showing how markets fail to price what matters most for human flourishing. Smith believed that sympathy and moral sentiment should guide economic behavior, not pure self-interest. The man we’ve turned into capitalism’s patron saint actually warned against its excesses.
Karl Marx built on these insights with devastating clarity. Under capitalism, he argued, use value – what things actually do for people – becomes subordinated to exchange value – what they can be sold for. This “commodity fetishism” obscures the social relationships behind production, making exploitation appear natural rather than constructed. Marx revealed how capitalism transforms human labor itself into a commodity, alienating workers from their creative potential and reducing them to mere factors of production.
These thinkers understood what we’ve forgotten: that how we define value shapes everything else. Their warnings about subordinating human welfare to market mechanisms explain precisely how we arrived at today’s crisis – where essential workers earn little while financial speculators grow increasingly wealthy, and life-sustaining forests matter less than logging profits.
Economic theories of value have undergone a fundamental shift over time. They moved from objective approaches that tied value to factors of production toward subjective theories where value becomes context-dependent, determined purely by individual preference. Today, it’s widely assumed that value is always reflected in market price. Worth has become increasingly connected with society’s perceived values rather than genuine contribution. Additionally, the crucial distinction between productive and unproductive rent-seeking value has basically collapsed – value is value, whether it generates or extracts. This dominant approach to subjective values creates serious consequences.
Market failures reveal the theory’s flaws. Subjective value theory assumes an idealized world of perfect competition, commodity goods, complete markets, and rational consumers. Reality tells a different story. When only a few companies control a market – like Google dominating search or Amazon controlling e-commerce – prices become too high and production insufficient. Pharmaceutical giants charge thousands for insulin that costs pennies to produce. When markets are incomplete or collapse under even small shocks, widespread damage follows. The 2008 financial crisis devastated asset prices and jobs when mortgage markets collapsed. Energy markets routinely fail during crises, leaving vulnerable people unable to heat their homes. Adam Smith stressed that markets need fairness and morality to function correctly. Subjective value theory undermines this ability and denies the truth that social capital must be cultivated for economic capital to grow.
Human frailties expose another weakness. Behavioral science shows that as consumers and market participants, we’re far from the rational people economic theory assumes. We make decisions based on emotions, follow herd mentality during market bubbles, and systematically undervalue future benefits. The dot-com crash and housing bubble demonstrated how irrational exuberance drives markets away from any reasonable valuation. People consistently choose immediate gratification over long-term welfare, explaining why sustainable products struggle despite environmental concerns.
National welfare suffers under this approach. How we define value shapes which activities society views as productive, influencing public policies and private priorities. The subjective approach claims neutrality by making everything price comparable. But it fails catastrophically when measuring welfare and intangible contributions. GDP doesn’t include the invaluable work of full-time parents and carers who nurture future generations, or the economic benefits of robust social welfare systems that reduce crime, improve health outcomes, and create social stability. It measures utility, not welfare, ignoring unpriced outputs entirely. Moreover, it treats all money equally – £1000 means nothing to Mark Zuckerberg but transforms someone on welfare, yet both count identically in economic calculations.
These failures are fundamental flaws in how subjective value theory understands human society. When we reduce everything to individual preferences and market prices, we lose sight of collective needs and shared values. The path forward requires returning to objective measures that recognize what genuinely sustains human flourishing – solidarity, fairness, responsibility, and care for future generations.
From the global financial crash to the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s no shortage of case studies proving how acutely the subjective value approach has failed contemporary society. Let’s examine just one: the climate crisis.
Since the Industrial Revolution began around 1760, humanity has released over 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. What started with coal-powered steam engines has accelerated exponentially – we’ve emitted more carbon since 1990 than in all previous human history combined. Today’s 36 billion tons of annual emissions break down roughly as follows: energy generation accounts for 25 percent, agriculture and land use 24 percent, industry 21 percent, transport 14 percent, and buildings 6 percent. Net zero by 2050 isn’t political theatre – it’s the scientific minimum to prevent warming beyond 1.5°C, the threshold beyond which feedback loops may trigger runaway climate change.
The consequences of inaction are mathematically brutal. Current trajectories lead to 3–4°C warming, rendering vast agricultural regions uninhabitable, displacing over a billion people, and triggering ecosystem collapse across multiple continents. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates economic damages at 10–25 percent of global GDP by 2100 – equivalent to experiencing the 2008 financial crisis every single year.
Yet measuring climate costs exposes the fatal flaw in subjective valuation. Market-priced damages seem manageable – hurricanes cost $100 billion here, droughts reduce agricultural output by 2 percent there. But climate change systematically destroys assets that markets cannot price. When coral reefs die, we lose ecosystem services worth an estimated $375 billion annually in coastal protection, fisheries, and tourism. When communities fragment under climate stress, we lose social capital built over generations – the trust networks, local knowledge, and collective resilience that no market can recreate.
This represents the tragedy that the next generation will face. Today’s fossil fuel executives optimizing quarterly profits won’t witness 2080’s climate chaos. Corporate discount rates of 8–12 percent annually make investments beyond ten years essentially worthless in present value calculations. Monetary policy horizons extend two-to-three years maximum. Credit cycles peak at roughly a decade. All systematically undervalue climate action.
Subjective value theory tells us that if something isn’t priced, it has no economic value – so rational actors treat atmospheric absorption capacity as infinite and free. Each corporation finds it economically sensible to emit rather than pay for reductions, yet collective emissions guarantee system collapse. Natural gas company ExxonMobil’s internal climate models proved remarkably accurate while the company publicly funded climate denial – this wasn’t corporate evil but rational profit maximization within a value system that cannot price planetary habitability.
Subjective value theory can’t solve climate change because it can’t price what matters most: the habitability of Earth itself, the stability of civilizations, the continuation of species. When accounting systems treat the atmosphere as a free dumping ground, markets will use it as one until the entire system collapses.
As the climate crisis illustrates, our wholehearted embrace of market values has robbed society of its capacity to express what truly matters. Is the prognosis completely bleak? Can we find our way out of this impasse?
Yes – by adopting values-led leadership. Note: values, not value. This approach rests on five key attributes: purpose, perspective, clarity, competence, and humility.
Purpose defines what an organization stands for, whether it’s a company, charity, or government. Google’s purpose is organizing the world’s information; the World Bank aims to end extreme poverty. Purpose should anchor every goal, strategy, and decision. It connects directly to trust because sticking to purpose demonstrates integrity, which builds trustworthiness. True understanding of purpose comes with recognizing that leaders are stewards – they must hand purpose on to others. A leader assumes responsibility, not power.
Perspective means taking a view that encompasses both horizon and periphery. Pope Francis exemplified this beautifully when he reminded us that “we are all in the same storm, but not all in the same boat.” This perspective recognizes that while we face shared challenges, our circumstances differ dramatically. Leaders need to act as interdependent communities, not independent individuals competing for advantage.
Clarity requires focus – being present in the moment and learning from experience. Effective leaders simplify the complicated, reduce complex problems to manageable parts, and communicate essentials clearly. During COVID-19, leaders like Jacinda Ardern and Angela Merkel demonstrated this perfectly. They laid out complexity honestly, spoke with genuine empathy, and stuck to key messages without wavering. They struck that crucial balance between realism about challenges and optimism about outcomes.
Competence means strategy matters, but execution proves crucial. This doesn’t require getting everything right, but it does mean getting more right than wrong. Competence becomes vital during hard decisions. When John F. Kennedy faced the Cuban Missile Crisis, he demonstrated competence by consulting widely, considering multiple options carefully, and ultimately choosing a naval quarantine that avoided both appeasement and nuclear war – threading an impossibly narrow needle through patient, methodical decision-making.
Humility might not be the first word that comes to mind when thinking of leadership, but the ability to learn and admit mistakes is essential. Humble leaders acknowledge uncertainty, seek diverse perspectives, and change course when evidence demands it. They understand that owning errors strengthens rather than weakens their authority.
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