Leading with Courage in an Era of Uncertainty

0:28This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. of America for a reason. With SUVs made to move with your rhythm. The versatile Equinox tackles your entire day. The spacious Traverse fits your crew and your whole weekend. And tracks bring style with value you can count on. All infused with tech that has your back. So your drive always hits the right chord. Chevrolet. Together let's drive. Why did you think that now was a good time to write about this topic? Is it a difficult time for business leaders and organizations collectively to be courageous? So to understand that question, you have to first ask the question, what triggers fear?

1:15So what triggers fear is uncertainty. Now, let me back up on that. What is uncertainty? Uncertainty is different from risk. There was a very famous essay written by an economist Frank Knight. Risk is where you know the distribution of outcomes and you can put a probability on them. Uncertainty is where you don't know. If you look at what's happening around us today, what do we have? We have geopolitical uncertainty. We have political uncertainty. We have technological uncertainty. We have economic uncertainty. We have health uncertainty. We have environmental uncertainty. And I can go on and on.

1:54And I'm not the only one feeling it. In a recent an essay and also talked about how in earnings calls, CEOs mention the word uncertainty three times as often in this last quarter than they did in the previous quarter. If you look at the VIX index, which people in the stock market loosely call the fear index, it has spiked. So we have manifest uncertainty around us, which naturally normally will trigger fear, which naturally and normally leads to the classic freeze response. Let's wait. We don't know what to do. Let's not invest right now. We need to just see how this tariffs and whatever else is going to play out.

2:41And sometimes that may be the prudent response, but sometimes you need to be willing to lean into that fear.

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