(FORTUNE Magazine) – Managerial courage. Managerial courage? ''It's an oxymoron,'' argues one academic expert on the executive arts, a self-contradiction like, say, military intelligence, or congressional restraint. Well, perhaps not quite. It is true, however, that when business people are asked about the subject, most draw a blank, at least initially. Dig a bit deeper, though, into the quotidian events that make up the managerial life -- conversations, meetings, decisions -- and behavior that looks suspiciously like you know what begins to turn up. To the untutored eye, the instances may not seem dramatic; indeed, if the person played his or her cards right, the episode will appear positively ho-hum. But press El Bravo on the matter in private and he will often admit that, yes, it did take a little moxie to get through that particular scrape. Then he will say something like, ''If I hadn't done it, I couldn't have lived with myself afterward.'' Courage, the moral philosophers tell us, is the willingness to put oneself at risk in service to some greater good, some cause higher than one's own welfare. The bigger the risk, and the greater the good, the more substantial the courage required. By this standard, can a C.E.O.'s conduct ever truly qualify as courageous? Some examples to support the argument that it can: Joel Slutzky, the head of Odetics, a high-tech electronics outfit in California, describes what happened after he decided to launch the publicly held company on a two-year research effort that hit quarterly earnings in the interim: ''It seemed the whole world came down on us.'' To stiffen his resolution in the face of angry calls from shareholders, he retreated to the library, consulting biographies of Edison and other technological innovators to remind himself how long such pioneering typically takes. At Scientific-Atlanta, another high-tech operation, Sidney Topol presided over 40 quarters of uninterrupted profit growth, leaving shareholders expecting more of the same. Then, in 1982, a key product the company was counting on -- a decoder for cable TV, to be boringly specific -- turned out to be a dud. Topol made the decision to pull it off the market and reimburse customers, which crashed earnings. ''It really gets to you, every day,'' recalls Topol of the flak he took. His mainstay during the crisis: the ''unconditional love'' of his wife and daughters. Why not deem such acts of leadership courageous? They are, after all, for the good of the Corp. Two reasons. First, it is precisely the good of the Corp. that the C.E.O. is paid to look after. Second, where's the risk? Okay, so just possibly -- it's usually a faint possibility -- he will lose his job. These days any fall from the executive heights seems pretty well cushioned by a pile of money waiting below. Yes, yes, you whose hearts bleed for those in high places, he loses status, perks, and power as well. But are those equivalent to, say, someone's livelihood, which is what a lower-ranking manager may be putting on the line when he acts courageously? For genuine managerial courage, you probably have to look lower down in the organization to someone who has a lot to lose and a boss who can cause him to lose it. Every manager worth the title faces situations at some point that call for intestinal fortitude. He has to deliver bad news, sometimes to good people: Betty, in spite of your 30 years of loyal service, I'm afraid we're going to have to let you go in the current cutback. He has to make unpopular decisions: We've come a long way with the quality circles, but we're going to have to close the plant anyway. Professor Allan R. Cohen of Babson College suggests that it may even take something like courage for a manager to refuse to act heroically in times of trouble: Sorry, guys, I'm not going to play Lee Iacocca on this one; you do your best to solve the problem and I'll live with the mistakes you make and, I hope, learn from them. With the possible exception of the last example, though, it's hard to see how these admittedly unpleasant duties require true courage. The manager doesn't have that much at risk. No, where the highest managerial courage comes in is acting for the good of the organization in the face of potential wrath from above. Sometimes this entails breaking with standard operating procedure: Our hiring policy has been blatantly discriminatory; here are six estimable job candidates who don't belong to the same ethnic group you do. Or it may simply be a matter of speaking up. Begging your pardon, sirs, but the chief executive isn't wearing any clothes. With respect, O Exalted V.P., might not that proposed advertising scheme run afoul of certain regulatory technicalities -- i.e., be illegal? This isn't whistleblowing -- spilling the beans outside the company -- but sometimes it may be more effective in getting an organization to change its ways. Harvey Hornstein, a professor at Columbia, focused on just this type of stoutheartedness in his recent book, Managerial Courage, perhaps the first full-length treatment of the subject. His findings, based on scores of interviews with managers at large corporations, represent an eye-opening guide to what courageous behavior works and what doesn't. What works, in the sense of at least getting the organization to consider seriously a manager's principled dissent, is a pitch couched in terms of hard business facts: These pieces of evidence suggest that we must substantially change the way we do business in that market, despite the chairman's misgivings. Appeals to higher values -- it's the right thing to do, it's the Zorch Corp. way -- seldom help. Attacks on individuals -- the divisional V.P. is ruining morale; he's got to go -- are almost guaranteed to fail. The effective courageous manager does his homework, digging for facts that the consensus-heads may have missed. He presents his findings in a businesslike, hang-out-no-banners way. He works aboveboard to marshal political support for his views. He engages in no dramatics. What he does ''wouldn't make a very good movie,'' observes Michael Lombardo, a research director at the nonprofit Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina. Why do the courageous managers act that way? Not, as it turns out, just because they think their way is right for the company. According to Hornstein's research, they say they do it mostly to preserve their managerial self-respect. Courageous managers have a lot invested in what Hornstein calls their ''work identity'' -- the sense that they know this particular part of the business better than anyone else. Hence the comments about not being able to live with themselves if they did otherwise. They're probably right about that. Hornstein says the most wrenching of his discoveries was what happens to managers who felt they should have acted courageously in a certain situation but didn't: They carry the smack of defeat within themselves for years. Some seemed almost physically crumpled. AH, BUT IF you can summon the requisite courage. It can arm you against any number of the insults that life, or the company, may throw at you. Lombardo tells of an executive at a big company that desperately needed to unload a product that it had made to excess. The man thought he had found a way to do it and make money besides. The only wrinkle: The potential buyer was a Spaniard, who insisted on pleasure before business. Come to Spain, the grandee told him, shoot pheasants with me and then we'll talk turkey. The executive had a meeting with his superiors coming up on Monday, but agreed to fly to Spain the preceding week. He got there, settled in at the Spaniard's finca ready to hunt -- and the rains began. Delay followed delay. The executive's boss, growing nervous about the impending meeting, sent him a cable ordering him to return by Monday. The rain kept falling. The executive missed the meeting, stayed till the skies cleared, shot the pheasants, and completed the sale. On his return to headquarters, he was promptly demoted. Years later, after his retirement, he told Lombardo, ''Maybe I didn't go as high as I might have gone in the company; I might have had a shot at C.E.O. But someday, when I'm very, very old, I'll still be awfully proud of what I did.''