Courageous Leadership for the Twenty-First Century

Today's the biggest problems such as hunger, poverty, unemployment, inequality, corruption, terrorism and wars, lack of liberty and justice, unfair globalization, and environmental destruction are threatening the lives of many people throughout the world and putting future generations under a great risk. These problems have reached such a level that their solutions require urgent and radical changes. Most people, many academicians and scholars argue that contemporary leadership practices will not be able to solve these problems. Contemporary leadership practices are either preserving the status quo or not making the necessary changes to solve them.This paper argues that the courageous leadership practices could make such changes for solving the current problems in the twenty-first century. The courageous leaders are brave, and they have heart, spirit and exceptional intellectual and emotional capacity to make drastic changes. They take risks to face and deal with difficult problems instead of overtaking them to move organizations and nations forward. They are creative so that they can make objective analysis, select the most effective strategies, motivate people at their maximum capacities and act under high uncertainties. Great courageous political leaders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as Ataturk, Mao, Lenin, Castro, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and the others made drastic changes. They solved many difficult problems through utilizing again some of those courage-related characteristics. Also, business leaders like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jorma Ollila and others used some of those courage-related characteristics for building new and successful business organizations.In this study, we analyze the courage characteristics of these leaders including intellectual (knowledge) courage, moral courage, creativity courage, biological courage, and followers’ courage. The analysis is made within the framework of strategic management process. The insights are gathered from their leadership experiences that may provide some perspectives for the leaders of the twenty-first century to solve current problems and satisfy people's needs.