What if everything you learned about leadership is backwards? Why the future belongs to the gloriously inconsistent and the beautifully uncertain…
Confidence is so last season. The world is moving faster than a gossip in a WhatsApp group. If you’re not ready to pivot, you’re just roadkill. Humility is the new flex. The leaders who admit they don’t have all the answers? They’re the ones who actually get answers.
Take Gandhi—India’s OG game-changer. He didn’t just preach humility; he lived it. “It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.” Translation: even the smartest can be wrong. And that’s where the real power lies.
Remember when Netflix announced they were splitting into Netflix and Qwikster? The name alone sounded like a pharmaceutical side effect. “Ask your doctor if Qwikster is right for you. Side effects may include nausea, customer revolt, and stock price hemorrhaging.”
Reed Hastings didn’t just step in it – he did a full cannonball into the deep end of stupid. The internet didn’t just roast him; they turned him into a digital rotisserie chicken.
Now, here’s where most CEOs would have hired a crisis management firm, blamed the market for “not understanding the vision,” and doubled down like a Vegas gambler on a losing streak. Hastings did something so radical it should have its own TED Talk: He admitted he was spectacularly, publicly, embarrassingly wrong.
Not a mealy-mouthed “mistakes were made” politician-speak, but a full-throated “I screwed up, this was dumb, I’m killing it” mea culpa. That moment of nuclear-level humility? It didn’t just save Netflix – it turned them into a $150 billion streaming empire.
Qwikster died faster than a horror movie teenager, but Netflix? They’re still here, making us all question our life choices with true crime documentaries.
Ratan Tata could have played the typical Indian business maharaja – sitting on a throne of yes-men, making pronouncements from his ivory tower, expecting everyone to kiss his ring and validate his genius.
Instead, this man – this absolute legend – chose to be the anti-emperor. During the Nano project, he didn’t just listen to feedback; he actively hunted it down like a bloodhound. Engineers, factory workers, chai wallahs, random people on the street – everyone became his advisory board.
When the initial designs were garbage, he didn’t blame the team or fire the engineers. He looked in the mirror and said, “Maybe I’m wrong.” That’s not just leadership; that’s leadership with a PhD in self-awareness.
Under his watch, Tata Group went from $4 billion to over $100 billion. Coincidence? I think not. Turns out, when you stop pretending you’re the smartest person in the room, you actually become the smartest person in the room.
Jeff Bezos has been religiously consistent about one thing – customer obsession. Everything else? Fair game for a complete overhaul. Amazon started as a bookstore, became a marketplace, morphed into a cloud computing company, then a logistics company, then a media empire, then a space program.
Most CEOs would have been paralyzed by analysis, stuck in “focus” mode, trying to do one thing perfectly. Bezos said, “Focus is overrated,” and proved that being scattered can be strategic if you’re scattered in the right direction.
When Satya Nadella took over Microsoft, the company was basically a tech museum – impressive history, increasingly irrelevant present. The old Microsoft was built on a know-it-all culture, where being wrong was career death.
Nadella didn’t just change the products; he performed open-heart surgery on the corporate soul. From We know everything to We’re curious about everything. From defending yesterday’s decisions to exploring tomorrow’s possibilities.
Result? Microsoft went from a $300 billion has-been to a $2 trillion titan. Turns out, admitting you don’t know everything is surprisingly profitable.
Before any major decision, assign someone to argue against it like their career depends on it. Not token resistance, but full-contact intellectual combat. Make it their job to find every flaw, every weakness, every potential disaster scenario. In other words let her play Devil’s Advocate With a PhD Protocol.
Keep a detailed catalog of your most spectacular failures and what they taught you. Review it like scripture. Share it with your team. Make being wrong feel normal, not nuclear. Your Failure Museum is a learning goldmine.
Regularly torture your strongest beliefs with this question: “What evidence would make me change my mind about this?” If you can’t think of any, you’re not having beliefs – you’re having a religious experience. Sending your conviction for a thorough interrogation, in other words.
Here’s the delicious irony: The more you admit you don’t know, the more people trust your judgment. The more you change your mind, the more people respect your mind. The more human you become, the more powerful you become. And remember- humility is a superpower.
Jacinda Ardern, erstwhile Prime Minister of New Zealand didn’t govern like a traditional politician – all scripted answers and calculated positions. When she didn’t know something, she said so with the confidence of someone who knows that honesty is the ultimate power move.
During COVID-19, she didn’t pretend to have a crystal ball. She followed the science, listened to experts, and when new information emerged, she pivoted faster than a startup running out of runway. Her approval ratings didn’t suffer from this uncertainty – they soared because of her authenticity about it.
Warren Buffett’s annual letters aren’t just shareholder updates – they’re masterclasses in strategic self-deprecation. He calls his mistakes “bonehead decisions” and dissects them like a pathologist examining a crime scene.
This isn’t corporate flagellation; it’s genius reputation management. By owning his failures spectacularly, he builds unshakeable credibility for his successes.
Time for calling a spade a shovel(or at least a spade)-Most leaders are suffering from terminal arrogance. They’ve confused confidence with competence, mistaken certainty for strength, and turned doubt into the enemy.
These leaders are like GPS systems that refuse to recalculate when they’ve clearly taken a wrong turn. They’d rather drive into a lake than admit they might have made a mistake.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Your certainty is killing your company. Your unwavering conviction is a corporate cancer. Your refusal to be wrong is making you spectacularly, expensively, publicly wrong.
The persuadable future isn’t just uncertain – it’s aggressively, relentlessly, beautifully uncertain. The leaders who thrive won’t be the ones who predict it perfectly. They’ll be the ones who adapt to it fastest.
They’ll be wrong quickly, wrong cheaply, and wrong openly. They’ll update their beliefs as frequently as they update their phones. They’ll treat certainty like a disease and curiosity like a superpower.
Radical open-mindedness is the ultimate competitive advantage. The world is moving too fast for rigid thinking. Stay flexible, or get left behind. Kill your darlings. Fall in love with your ideas—then be ready to bury them if they’re not working. Encourage dissent. Make it safe for your team to challenge you. If everyone agrees with you, you’re either a dictator or a delusional.
Confidence is overrated. Humility is underrated. Persuadability is the new black. So, next time someone asks you to be more consistent, tell them: “Consistency is for breakfast. I’m having inconsistency for lunch—and humility for dessert.
Ready to weaponize your willingness to be wrong? Ready to be persuadable?