It is pretty straight forward when talking about corporate talent, we can see the performers who raise share value or steer a company into a new direction. Steve Jobs at apple is a highly talented visionary as is his designer Jonathan Ive. There are countless examples of people in business, science and technology, sports and the arts, who are universally recognized as being highly talented.

What is trickier is if you ask who can you quote as being recognisably wise in business, sports, the arts, or science and technology. There are exceptions you might think that David Attenborough is a good candidate for a wise man

Wisdom is a bit old fashioned in the modern, online, connected, global entity and it’s much more difficult to spot or recognize.

One description of Wisdom is:

‘Wisdom is comprehension of what is true or right coupled with optimum judgment as to action. Synonyms include: sagacity, discernment, or insight. Wisdom often requires control of one’s emotional reactions (the “passions”) so that one’s principles, reason and knowledge prevail to determine one’s actions’.

Wisdom is less about performance and more about judgment, for example I have never seen a person’s CV with anything that relates to their capacity for wisdom or a ratio of how wise they are, yet wisdom is not about the stereotypical image of old men, long beards and philosophising, it is about performance but it is also about looking beyond the immediate requirement and making judgments that have an ethical and moral dimension.

At first sight you might say that it’s pretty obvious that wisdom is a good thing, that we need to have wise people in charge of commercial and public entities but I suggest that it more important than that. You don’t get a wisdom module with an MBA and wisdom has traditionally been associated with paternalism and something that a hundred years ago came under the responsibilities of church and societies so-called elders. The Victorians were familiar with the idea of people in authority showing wisdom as part of their skills set, although to be honest they suffered just as badly from the deeply unwise decisions and judgments made by their politicians, generals and judges.

The traditional board directors were once chosen because they brought not only expertise to the companies endeavors but supposedly wisdom, wisdom that was a check and balance against ‘unwise’ commercial decisions, a reference point on what the company was trying to achieve. These people exercised a wider judgment around what the effects of board decisions were on the society and the people that the company worked with.

The story of Marconi and its fall from being a cash rich diverse and proftable busienss to a hollwo shell is a classic case study of when wisdom is missing in leaders.

The Marconi story is a story of how two men took over a bellwether of British industry, a business with a heritage stretching back more than a century with £2.6bn of cash reserves, and squandered their inheritance in little more than two years. And it is a story of how billions of pounds and dollars were bet on the internet revolution and how a large amount of that money was lost. The fact that the company’s name was changed to reflect its long association with the inventor of the radio might be seen as a disservice to Guglielmo Marconi.

When George Simpson, as he was known then, arrived at the company in September 1996, it was called GEC and had been run for 33 years by one of the great men of British business, Lord Arnold Weinstock, who insisted on calling himself managing director. But within months of Simpson’s arrival Lord Weinstock was gone. Or, to be precise, he was kicked upstairs and given a small office and the empty title of chairman emeritus. Simpson began to dismantle the rest of the old guard, firing or easing out long-standing executives and bringing in his own men. His most important recruit was John Mayo, a corporate financier, who was drafted in as finance director. Mayo had risen to prominence at the investment bank SG Warburg where he helped mastermind the break-up of ICI and was then rewarded with the job of finance director at the demerged pharmaceuticals business Zeneca.

The two men drew up a blueprint for GEC that looked nothing like the business they had inherited and owed a lot to Mayo’s financial engineering skills. This rings bells with reference to the banking crisis and their love of complex financial products.

In January 1999 they did the first of the three mega-deals that were to transform GEC by announcing the £7.7bn (£5.5bn) sale of its defence interests to British Aerospace in exchange for cash and shares.

Investors chased up Marconi’s share price to the dizzy heights of £12.50, valuing the company at £35bn. In 2001 it was valued at £3.1bn, less than a 10th of its all-time high. In fairness to Simpson and Mayo, the performance of Marconi has mirrored that of other technology, media and telecoms stocks. All had been hit savagely in the collapse of the dot.com boom of the late 1990’s and the downturn in equipment spending as telecoms struggled under the huge borrowings taken on to finance their third-generation mobile networks.

While profit warnings flew thick and fast from counterparts such as Lucent, Cisco, Nortel and Alcatel, the men from Marconi seemed to be in denial, insisting there was no need for a trading statement because there was nothing to update. There followed a contraction of the business and its value that was quite spectacular and The rest as they say is history; A corporate story on the scale of a modern corporate Greek tragedy, a tale of pride, ‘talent’ and a massive lack of wisdom.

In the current world of climate change, shifting geopolitical scenarios and a constant air of threat, economic uncertainty and risk… perhaps headhunters and recruitment managers should be looking out for future leaders with talent but more importantly, with wisdom!

The challenge now is how do you recognise it and measure it!

As Naguib Mahfouz said…… “You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions”