I’ve never forgotten my college professor for integral calculus, Mr. Whatever-his-name-was.

I can still see him, standing at the front of the lecture hall, shirtsleeves rolled up, wielding a piece of chalk in his hand. “Let us say . . .” he began, employing the standard introduction to mathematical postulation. He wrote the words, Let us say up on the board.

That was the last thing he wrote on the board. Many times, I longed to tell him, “Professor, that wasn’t actually the part we needed you to spell out for us.” But I didn’t. A few weeks into the trimester, I’d already made up my mind to become an English major. Let us say that someone else can tell the math teacher he doesn’t know how to teach.

Not surprisingly, I never really grasped the essence of the subject and yet, astonishingly, I managed to pass the course with a B+, which made me feel somewhat cheated. With a competent instructor, I might have gained a clearer understanding of this arcane field of mathematics that would have expanded my intellectual field of vision and extended my depth of knowledge.

Both my inspiringly good teachers and my lamentably bad ones launched me into my teaching career. Educators are leaders, which means they have an ethical responsibility to their students, as do parents to their children and employers to their employees.

But responsibility works in both directions. Leaders and followers need to meet each other halfway. That is the lesson of the current entry into the Ethical Lexicon:

Calculus (cal·cu·lus/ kal-kyuh-luhs) noun

An area of advanced mathematics that studies continuously changing values; a way of calculating, judging, or deciding something in a complicated situation.

As geometry is the study of shape and algebra is the study of operation, calculus is the study of change. It has played a critical role in the development of navigation, mapping the orbit of planetary bodies, and describing the motion of subatomic particles. It contributes to building safer structures, plotting space travel, and anticipating how medicines will interact with the body. Economists use calculus to predict supply, demand, and maximum potential profits.

For those of us who are not mathematicians, calculus still has immediate relevance. Even if you don’t know the difference between a logarithm and an algorithm, its linguistic origin offers highly practical insights.

The word calculus comes from Latin meaning small stone, because we cannot understand the big picture without looking at small pieces, and vice versa. My college professor never communicated how integral calculus joins—or integrates—small pieces together to find how much we have.  Conversely, differential calculus breaks things down into small pieces to discover how they change.

Some of us are big-picture strategists; others are detail-oriented, procedural tacticians. Few of us are good at both. Just as the two branches of calculus approach observation from opposite directions, successful partnerships harness divergent thinking styles to produce a coherent, aspirational vision alongside a roadmap for turning that vision into reality. Working from both ends toward the middle is the key to understanding and implementation in all human endeavors and relationships.

Some problems or objectives, however, are so complex or elusive that we can’t work them out directly. Here, too, calculus comes to our aid. By identifying limits, calculus provides the means to get close enough to grasp a sense of what the answer or process should be, even when we can’t get all the way there.

What could be more relevant? Among popular business truisms are the seemingly contradictory ideas that good is the enemy of great and that perfect is the enemy of done. Of course, we want to strive for perfection. But business calculus acknowledges our limitation in achieving perfection, the ideal we can approach but never actually reach.

At the same time, we don’t want to settle for adequate when we know we can do better. Leadership has to manage the tension between good enough and as good as it gets. The ethical leader is the one who can find the sweet spot that enables a team to fulfill its maximum potential by contemplating a few simple questions:

• Are we serving the client or the customer as best we can?
• Is our product or service representing our brand image in the best way possible?
• Can we afford to invest more time, money, and energy into this project?  Can we afford not to?
• Will further improvement make a meaningful difference in outcome?
• Do we want to be known for quality, alacrity, or economy, or the best combination of all three?

In any dynamic situation, leaders need to juggle responsibilities, keep focused on moving targets, and respond in the moment to unexpected challenges. They must gauge what actions will advance their goals while weighing them against the cost in time, money, employee morale, and brand image.

A successful leadership team is one in which these factors are represented and defended as values, organized into an operational system that seeks to harmonize without sacrificing any of them. Calculate that equation well, and the pieces will naturally arrange themselves into a solid and flourishing enterprise.