One issue, which I used to talk about by looking at George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, is how madness, heresy, and genius are related. We often describe great leaders as having the drive, vision, imagination, and creativity to transform their organizations through daring new ideas. Retrospectively, of course, we sometimes find that such heresies have been the foundation for bold and necessary change, but heresy is usually just crazy. Most daring new ideas are foolish or dangerous and appropriately rejected or ignored. So while it may be true that great geniuses are usually heretics, heretics are rarely great geniuses. If we could identify which heretics would turn out to be geniuses, life would be easier than it is. There is plenty of evidence that we cannot.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "One issue, which I used to talk about by looking at George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, is how madness, heresy, and genius are related. We often describe great leaders as having the drive, vision, imagination, and creativity to transform their organizations through daring new ideas. Retrospectively, of course, we sometimes find that such heresies have been the foundation for bold and necessary change, but heresy is usually just crazy. Most daring new ideas are foolish or dangerous and appropriately rejected or ignored. So while it may be true that great geniuses are usually heretics, heretics are rarely great geniuses. If we could identify which heretics would turn out to be geniuses, life would be easier than it is. There is plenty of evidence that we cannot." in the context of "James G. March, in Diane Coutu, "Ideas as Art: A Conversation with James G. March", Harvard Business Review 84 (10), pp. 82–91 (October 2006)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.