Smart leaders are not eggheads or theorists or idle dreamers.
What makes leaders smart is applied knowledge and sure instincts.
One of my wife’s uncles is a successful businessman who took a company public and has funded several other ventures. I recently overheard him being interviewed by a university student who was talking to entrepreneurs. He was asked how certain he was of success before taking on his commercial ventures. Had he run the numbers, done his projections, etc? His reply was instructive. He knew his market and that there was money to be made there, but he didn’t have all the projections and data to back it up. If business success could be guaranteed through that approach, then all it would take is MBA’s and accountants to do the financial projections and fund a venture, and success would certainly follow. The fact that it doesn’t often happen that way in the real world is very instructive. The successful entrepreneurs cannot often quantify their instincts, but they are very strong at applying their knowledge.
One thing that sets truly smart leaders apart is their sense of timing. They intuit when to enter (or exit) a market, and they especially know when it’s time to take a certain amount of knowledge and to put it to work.
Knowledge and money have similarities and an important difference. Both have to be applied or invested toward a particular end in order to be productive. Idle money will eventually erode through inflation. Knowledge has an even shorter shelf-life than money; if it is not applied timely, it loses its value swiftly.
Smart leaders know when its time to roll up the sleeves and get to work. Knowledge must be applied to reap a return on investment.
