The Real Meaning of Courage?

Courage is rarely a business buzzword. In workplaces built on process and deliberation, the word “courage” is more likely to drum up images of the battlefield or political appearances before a hostile nation. Courage has been overlooked and underemployed in many industries –not in medicine, where patients and physicians must have daily courage to face their most harrowing trials– but certainly in the mundane details of SOP and protocol that descend to blanket any large or growing organization.

Conversely, courage is woven into our very mission at PPH, where we fight to the core every day against cancer and neurodegeneration. Emotionally, we fortify ourselves with daily courage as we work toward a future that will obliterate present and past suffering. We trust courageously in teamwork and accountability to build that future, we constructively challenge each other to evolve our thinking, and we boldly take a stand against corrupting influences, knowing all the while that those who show courage create courage.

Specifically, we lead the precision health movement with a collective courage, which directs us to work together toward fruitful endeavors and away from those that bear no fruit. If we each have the courage to let go of what isn’t helping us personally, professionally, and as an organization, we will all share in our wins and carry each other through our losses. This collective courage is about more than relinquishing personal pride; it’s just as much about fearlessly trusting in colleagues and the shared mission that unites us. In defining moments, collective courage allows us to pull together before crisis and jump into solutions headfirst, taking down elephantine problems as a close-knit tribe.

Large companies, especially those with bureaucracy, can typically be intense breeding grounds for fear –fear of offending superiors, of alienating colleagues, and of jeopardizing a raise. All of these fears stifle creativity and necrotize new solutions. Instead, having the courage to come forward with new ideas is what leads directly to the innovations at the heart of our enterprise. People have to try new and different things in order to change the game, just as an organization like Powering Precision Health must courageously disrupt the industry to move the needle in healthcare. Fear of failure counterintuitively causes us to fail, because it prevents mistakes, without which we cannot grow. By catalyzing collective courage across the organization, we boost morale and rest assured that, if we fall, our team will pick us back up.

In order to galvanize us into action, we’ve centered PPH around an imperative: we must reduce healthcare costs by 40 percent, increase access by 60 percent and add eight years to our average life expectancies, all by 2030. If courage comes from sticking to what we believe is right, we are placing this mission close to our hearts and allowing it to animate us. The choice is between great ambition and remaining stationary, being a part of history instead of making history, entering people’s lives instead of changing them.

Trying for an uncomfortable goal will inevitably cause anxiety and fear, but without these factors, we won’t stay relevant for long. We must be bold and daring, both amongst ourselves and in the greater world, with full confidence that we are doing the right thing. After all, knowing fear and moving forward regardless is the true definition of courage. Our goals should excite us and challenge us in order to stretch us beyond what we think we can accomplish. Indeed, as the city architect of Chicago, Daniel Burnham, said, “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized.” If we remain inspired, give our all, and take risks, we will make advances, learn from our mistakes, and move us all collectively into the future. To doubters, we ask you to have courage.