Now Is the Time for Courage

In the face of political, economic, and technological uncertainty, business leaders are often reluctant to take bold action. Some freeze, too overwhelmed to make decisions. Many hunker down, hoping to wait out the chaos. Others retrench, trying to protect their organization’s future and their careers. However, research shows that the old adage is true: Fortune favors the brave, not the cautious.

This is what my colleagues Nitin Nohria and Franz Wohlgezogen and I found more than a decade ago, when, during the 2008 financial crisis, we examined how 4,700 public companies had navigated the three previous recessions. We discovered that about 9% were able to emerge from each downturn in stronger shape than before, not just because they thoughtfully cut costs but also because they simultaneously took calculated risks to invest in growth. Without intending to, we documented the significant difference that courage makes in business.

Since then, I’ve been investigating what drives courageous behavior. In challenging circumstances, why do some leaders make daring moves while others hesitate? Philosophers as far back as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Mencius pondered whether bravery was an innate virtue or could be taught. Modern-day scientific research, spanning the fields of psychology, sociology, economics, neuroscience, and healthcare, confirms the latter view, showing that many types of people, including those who didn’t previously consider themselves brave, can be just that when the situation calls for it. And yet few studies have sought to understand how individuals can become more courageous—until now. Over the past several years, I have surveyed existing social and natural sciences scholarship, collected and analyzed leadership stories—some through archival research, others through more than 200 detailed interviews—and distilled the insights into a playbook for anyone looking to be more intrepid at work.

Bravery as a Choice

I define courage as a willingness to take bold, risky action to serve a purpose that you perceive to be worthy, usually in the face of an abiding fear. It can involve accepting a physical challenge, making yourself emotionally vulnerable, risking social or economic standing for your moral beliefs, or publicly championing new and unorthodox ideas. And as Nelson Mandela famously said, it is not the absence of fear but triumph over it.

Many experts argue that, in work and business settings, the best way to overcome anxiety about uncertainty is risk management. As professor Kathleen K. Reardon has written, courageous action is really an “intelligent gamble” based on “careful deliberation and preparation” that includes weighing risks and benefits. Indeed, when considering decisions like whether to fund a new business, undertake a merger or acquisition, or switch jobs, it’s sensible to do a cost/benefit analysis to reduce the odds of negative outcomes and mitigate their potential consequences. People have long used these tools to effectively manage and even profit from risk. But as research by the late economist Frank Knight has shown, they aren’t enough to help us behave boldly in situations where we can neither identify all the potential dangers we face nor estimate their chances of materializing. Under volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) conditions, when possible outcomes are unknown, most people feel a loss of control, triggering fear, which often leads to paralysis (the so-called freeze response) or retreat (flight). Brave leaders, by contrast, are able to reclaim their agency and fight.

And there are many examples of those who have: political leaders like Mandela and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky; decisive CEOs such as BlackRock’s Larry Fink and Chanel’s Leena Nair; scrappy entrepreneurs, from the legendary Steve Jobs to the lesser-known Aloke Bajpai of India’s online travel agency Ixigo; and even everyday employees and citizens, like Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, former US Airways pilot C.B. “Sully” Sullenberger, and the Taj Hotel staff members who risked their lives to help guests during a 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai.

In my research I found that individuals like these develop courage in five ways: They create positive narratives, cultivate confidence, take small steps to boost their comprehension of the challenges they face, make connections, and stay calm, employing a variety of techniques to do each.

At a moment when 76% of S&P 500 companies are citing “uncertainty” in their earnings calls (up from 37% in the three months prior, according to FactSet), these strategies are especially critical. What’s more, any leader can learn and deploy them to become more courageous.

[ Strategy 1 ] Create a Positive Narrative

The stories we tell have an enormous influence on our sense of self, our understanding of the wider world, and our ability to behave courageously. There are three ways that the leaders I studied crafted narratives to either lessen their fear or overcome it.

Go risk hunting. The first tactic is identifying and mitigating the challenges and threats you face. The point is not to reduce risk to zero (often an impossibility) but to shift how you perceive the unknown so that it becomes less daunting and you feel more capable of conquering the chaos. Risk hunting helps recast the world in a more orderly light, thereby emboldening you to move forward.

Larry Fink, cofounder of the asset management firm BlackRock, has built his entire career and business around this approach. He tasked his first hire, Charlie Hallac, with developing a comprehensive risk-assessment platform, later dubbed Aladdin, which has since become the gold standard among finance professionals. But even in the absence of such sophisticated tools, leaders like Fink obsessively search for signals in the noise around which they can build a positive story that will inspire action. For example, in this year’s annual letter, he pointed to clear opportunities for matching uninvested capital (the $25 trillion sitting idle in banks and money market funds in the United States alone) with government and corporate needs (an estimated $68 trillion for public and private infrastructure projects around the world over the next 25 years). Such data points—along with more detailed analysis—gave Fink and his management team the confidence to pursue three big acquisitions in late 2024: Global Infrastructure Partners, a firm with $170 billion in assets invested across more than 100 countries; Preqin, a private market data firm; and HPS, a leading manager of private credit.

Find a moral quest. Another tactic is to recast your work—including any risky decisions or actions you might take—as the heroic pursuit of values that you or your organization holds dear. Scholars have found that when people are inspired by their moral principles to act courageously, they feel a greater sense of belonging and self-worth and overcome their fears more easily.

Consider how Haugen, an engineer, explained her decision to release internal Facebook documents showing that the company’s products were damaging teen mental health, failing to curb misinformation, and fomenting violence. As she told a reporter, “I did what I thought was necessary to save the lives of people…who I think are being endangered by Facebook’s prioritization of profits.” By leaning on her personal values, she found the courage to quit her lucrative job and share what she knew. Helena Foulkes, former president of CVS Pharmacy, and her team also gave moral reasons for their 2014 decision to stop selling cancer-causing tobacco products, which sacrificed $2 billion in sales and risked a consumer and investor backlash. “We had a lot of debates, and we didn’t all see eye to eye…because it’s a very scary thing to walk away from that size of business,” she recalled. But “we had 25,000 pharmacists working for us at the time….For all of them and us, to be working for a company which had made such a bold move really created a sense of pride.”

Call upon your faith. Many leaders also draw on their belief in a higher power to find courage in difficult circumstances, with a narrative that says, “I have encountered adversity, but I can appeal to God (or fate, or luck, or the universe) to emerge victorious.” Some people disparage such thinking as magical or irrational, but researchers tend to see it as adaptive, an important way of coping. For example, studies have shown that entrepreneurs spend more time praying than most people and are more likely to believe in an engaged, responsive God who takes a personal interest in them. Other research has shown that the belief that we will have good luck increases our sense of agency, which can help us face up to our fears and embrace more-difficult challenges.

Several successful U.S. company founders—Cadbury’s John Cadbury, Standard Oil’s John Rockefeller, Walmart’s Sam Walton, and Aflac’s Dan Amos—were or have been very public about the role their Christian faith played in helping them navigate the uncertainty of entrepreneurial life. Consider, too, former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, who kept a statue of the Hindu god Ganesha, the remover of obstacles and facilitator of success, in her office. “There are times when the stress is so incredible…then you close your eyes and think about a temple…and suddenly you feel, ‘Hey, I can take on the world.’ Hinduism floats around you and makes you feel somehow invincible,” she told The Times. That mindset no doubt emboldened her to pursue a purpose-driven shift to more-healthful products during her tenure, despite also having to deal with the 2008 financial crisis.

[ Strategy 2 ] Cultivate Confidence

Confidence comes from self-efficacy, which the late Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura described as “what you believe you can do with [the skills] you have under a variety of circumstances.” The courageous people I studied benefited from having developed deep competence in their everyday work, which made them feel better equipped to grapple with complex and ambiguous challenges. They also enhanced their sense of self-efficacy using three key tactics.

Train deliberately. To be confident in any role, you must study and apply best practices until they become second nature, allowing you to perform at your best even under pressure and amid change. In sales, that might mean knowing how to pitch clients, nurture relationships, and close deals; in tech, having a deep understanding of both engineering and product design; in HR, studying psychology and developing a playbook for sensitively handling any kind of employee emergency. Your training might not teach you how to respond to every crisis, but it should leave you feeling like a seasoned expert in your domain, who has the knowledge, skills, and fortitude to get the job done and the responsibility to do it.

For example, C.B. “Sully” Sullenberger’s pilot training didn’t include a unit on what to do when a midair collision with a flock of birds causes both of a plane’s engines to fail. However, when that happened to his January 2009 US Airways flight, Sullenberger was able to safely land the aircraft on the Hudson River. “As it turned out,” he later told the journalist Katie Couric, “my entire life had been preparation to handle that particular moment.”

Other cases in point include former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, whose academic career studying the Great Depression positioned him to help manage the 2008 financial crisis, and GE’s CEO, Larry Culp, whose deep knowledge of lean manufacturing practices, forged by a 25-year career at Danaher, including 13 as its chief executive, enabled him to execute a complex turnaround at the industrial giant.

Even at lower levels of an organization, training can bolster courageous action. Consider the Taj Mahal Palace employees who stayed at their posts during the several-day terrorist siege of the hotel in 2008. All had previously gone through an extensive 18-month onboarding to ensure that they would not only perform their jobs expertly but also adhere to the Taj Hotel culture of putting guests first. Throughout the attack, they fell back on that training, identifying themselves as stewards of the company and its customers, whom they bravely calmed and tried to protect.

Assemble a large tool kit. Courageous leaders have a broad array of metatools—ways to think, solve problems, and stay resilient—that allow them to tackle novel situations. For instance, when asked about the bravery it takes for astronauts to travel to and live on the International Space Station, NASA’s Terry Virts noted that the organization’s boot camp teaching mental endurance is as useful as its technical and physical training. For CVS’s Foulkes, an important individual tool was empowering her people through delegation, while a key team one was transparent debate—that is, “having really deep conversations about paradox and complexity…allowing people to share…what they’re excited about and what they’re nervous about…[and] taking those competing emotions and finding something new and different as a creative solution to that internal tension.”

Focus on what’s in your control. When you’re facing challenges from outside forces, it’s important to figure out where you can have an impact. That might mean breaking down a big challenge—like how to cope with shifting tariff policies—into smaller ones, like improving your ability to quickly change suppliers and to tweak pricing. Or it might mean simply ensuring that you’re getting the fundamentals of your operations right. In the world of sports, this strategy is often described as focusing on process, not outcomes. Although you can’t predict how your opponent will perform or the final score of any game, you do control your preparation, the energy you bring to the court or field, and how closely you adhere to your playbook. As the legendary college football coach Nick Saban used to tell his players, “We’re not going to talk about what we’re going to accomplish. We’re going to talk about how we’re going to do it.”

Business leaders who have employed this back-to-basics approach include former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who led the coffee chain through the 2008 financial crisis, competitive pressures, and a social media firestorm by refocusing his teams on the core café experience; and former Lego CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, who turned that company around by prioritizing its mission of fostering creativity through its brick building sets. Or consider how Bajpai, cofounder of Ixigo, navigated numerous near bankruptcies at the startup: “There have been at least four times…when we ran out of money. Most companies would have shut down, but in each situation the founders invested back in and went to survival salaries. Investors helped with some bridge money. Many [employees] took deep salary cuts. Most importantly, we [kept] shipping some of the most innovative products in the world.” Instead of getting overwhelmed and giving up, the people at the agency recommitted to serving their customers, and eventually the business thrived.

[ Strategy 3 ] Take Small Steps

Many people equate bold action with big moves. But the leaders and organizations I studied took small steps into murky environments before making leaps, deploying a strategy that Karl Weick calls sensemaking. Making small moves like this helps you gradually gain more clarity about your situation. You let go of the need for a perfect plan and open yourself to possibilities, trusting that the path will emerge as you proceed.

Evaluate objectively. The initial catalyst for sensemaking is often a disruptive event that creates uncertainty. While your instinct might be to freeze or flee, you must instead practice mindfulness, staying attuned to both the external situation and your own emotional response so that you can look at both more dispassionately. Ask questions like, What am I facing here? Whom can I call in to help and advise me? What immediate steps can I take to better understand what’s going on?

When the 2011 tsunami hit nuclear plants in Fukushima, Japan, destroying equipment and threatening catastrophic meltdown, Naohiro Masuda, the Daini site’s supervisor, and his team managed to save their facility by quickly evaluating the damage and calibrating their response. As 55-foot-high waves battered a plant designed to handle only up to 17 feet of water, they gathered around a whiteboard, writing down data on the situation and analyzing what could go wrong and how best to stop it.

Let meaning emerge. Next, scour the environment for any information you can get your hands on—even small, seemingly insignificant cues—and assemble them into an interpretation. What patterns do you notice? How does what you’re seeing relate to other situations you’ve encountered in the past? Create hypotheses and then choose the one that seems most plausible. Continue to collect information and then build, refine, or adjust. “Sensemaking is not about truth and getting it right,” Weick and his coauthors have observed. “Instead, it is about continued redrafting of an emerging story so that it becomes more comprehensive, incorporates more of the observed data, and is more resilient in the face of criticism.”

With the main control panels down at the Daini plant, Masuda sent team members out on a dangerous mission to inspect damaged equipment in person. Based on the information they gathered, they hypothesized that the plant’s cooling system had lost power, so they would need to bring in materials to fix it and find an alternative energy source.

Interpret in motion. Next you act on your hypothesis, exposing yourself to new cues that enable you to press on or reconsider and pivot. The key is to take steps that keep your options open—creating what executives at Amazon call “two-way doors,” which you can walk through but also back out of if necessary. Avoid becoming too confident in your initial interpretation. Stay curious as new information emerges, and be willing to take equally small steps in a different direction.

Initially, Masuda and his team sought to draw power from the one building on the property that still had it, but the technical challenges proved too great, so they decided to use the plant’s one functioning generator and shifted their work from one reactor to another after determining that the latter was in a more precarious state. They took small steps, observing, learning, and iterating, and ultimately averted disaster, while the other Fukushima plant unfortunately did not.

[ Strategy 4 ] Find Connection

Contrary to popular wisdom, there are few lone heroes. Courage is a team sport, and behind every brave leader, there is usually a group of less visible—but extremely important—supporters, as well as an array of constructive critics, including employees and customers. I found that bold leaders connect with others in three ways.

Turn to allies for an emotional boost. We all want to feel loved and respected. If you’re facing uncertainty, that kind of support becomes even more important. When you surround yourself with people who think that you have what it takes to be bold, you start to believe it yourself. Relationships also affirm people’s identities—for example as citizens, employees, or leaders—as well as their obligations to others, making them feel more duty bound to act. The brave leaders I encountered often had great mentors they could turn to in moments of struggle. Others were able to find courage by simply imagining what their allies expected they would accomplish.

Consider Nair, who was the chief human resources officer of Unilever before taking the helm of Chanel. She told me that when people questioned her competence as a woman in the workplace or as an HR (that is, “soft skills”) leader, she would remember the confidence that female family members, whose own ambitions had been stifled, instilled in her. “They would say things like, ‘Let Leena get the opportunity. She’s intelligent. She’s talented.’” She also told me about a conversation she had with her longtime mentor, Nooyi, about a new job Nair felt she wasn’t ready for. The former PepsiCo CEO advised her to think not about her limitations but about the key strengths she could bring to the role, which gave Nair the push she needed to take it.

Access resources. Your connections can provide tangible help, including money and manpower—a safety net that will allow you to feel more in control and thus more courageous. The investors who gave Ixigo’s Bajpai bridge funding are a good example. So are two organizations that Haugen turned to for support when releasing the information she had about Facebook: eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Luminate and the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid. Your network can also offer knowledge that can help you make sense of chaos and surmount obstacles. As Nooyi said in an interview with McKinsey, “You can’t know everything about everything. Bring in the expert. Let them coach you….Sitting down one-on-one and learning everything there is to learn is a good thing.”

Accept feedback. When taking any kind of risk, it’s critical to surround yourself with not just cheerleaders but also constructive critics who will honestly assess how you’re doing. When you allow others to judge your choices and point out contradictory signals, you’ll have more confidence in your ultimate course of action. So find people willing to discuss and then validate or challenge your narratives, interpretations, and competencies. Knudstorp, for example, emphasized the importance of candid customer feedback at Lego; one of his slogans was “Listen to the complainer.” Likewise, GE’s Culp is known for taking and encouraging “gemba walks,” a practice in which managers go to the factory floor to hear directly from frontline employees.

[ Strategy 5 ] Stay Calm

Psychologists have closely analyzed “emotional regulation,” the ability to influence your own feelings and experiences, particularly in moments when your “freeze, flee, or fight” response is triggered. Specific moves can help you mute or diminish fear, make it pass more quickly, or change how you experience and express it.

Practice self-care. To make good decisions in trying times, leaders need adequate sleep, nutrition, and hydration. You can’t think clearly if you’re running on fumes. As Nair, whose first three years at Chanel have been marked by brave bets on sustainability and philanthropy, recently said: “Invest in your physical and mental well-being. You have to put the oxygen mask on yourself to have the energy to play all the roles that you do.”

Embrace rituals. One tried-and-true way to reduce anxiety amid uncertainty is to seek comfort in the familiar and predictable. Courageous leaders rely on small, personally meaningful physical or mental rituals to center themselves. Ancient warriors from the Japanese Samurai to the Nordic Vikings had prebattle rituals. Apple founder Steve Jobs had a simple daily routine: Every morning, after making his bed and showering, he looked at himself in the mirror and asked, “If today was the last day of my life, would I be happy with what I’m about to do today?” Some entrepreneurs wear a lucky sweater or recite a certain mantra before each investor or client pitch. Bernanke followed his predecessor Alan Greenspan’s practice of always facing the clock at Fed meetings. Other executives, such as Schultz, rely on regular meditation.

Reframe the situation. You can preempt or limit your fear response by redefining what uncertainty means for you and your organization in the long term. Consider what pessimistic, realistic, and optimistic views might look like. With this technique, you can fully acknowledge the dangers you face while also tempering your reaction to them.

In Fink’s annual letter, he practiced reframing, writing: “We have lived through moments like this before. And somehow, in the long run, we figure things out.” Foulkes has done the same throughout her career: “My brain sometimes goes to what could go wrong, and I think that’s good [business school] training, but I also think it’s important to ask ourselves, ‘What could go right?’” And just as the thriving companies in my 2008 study with my coauthors saw recessions not as existential threats but as opportunities, Ixigo’s Bajpai reframed the Covid-19 outbreak as another unexpected crisis that would, of course, force him to conserve cash yet again—but also push the company to explore new areas of growth, including acquisitions to build its presence in train and bus travel, which laid the groundwork for its successful IPO last year.

. . .

As the pace of change and disruption accelerates, courage—or the lack of it—can make or break careers, organizations, and society. That’s not to say leaders should take outsize risks. But most of us tend to be too cowardly, not too reckless.

I’ve come away from my hundreds of interviews with executives, entrepreneurs, employees, coaches, and more convinced that bravery is a skill that everyone in business today must learn and teach to others. We can all use these strategies to improve ourselves and to shape the beliefs and actions of the people around us. Indeed, to make progress on big problems like climate change, economic inequality, and political polarization, we need to coalesce around a kind of collective courage. A bit more boldness will go a long way.

Copyright 2025 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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