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Redefining Success and Failure
Each human being is born with an innate desire for respect. Beyond the base Maslovian hierarchy, the most pressing human goal is to be of importâthat is, to be important.
The drive to matter has itself been a dark topic that invisibly binds all social organization, from the quiet plains of outer Mongolia to the teeming London streets, from the earliest bands of hunter-gatherers to the most modern empires and megacorporations.
This drive for importance is today commonly called leadership. It is the singular genius of the human species to look at alpha roles across the animal kingdom and mold the collected facts and intuitions into a sophisticated and ever-evolving art of moving others in new directions. Of course, the ability to move others in new directions isn't solely a practical concern: It is a piece of our inner drive to matter, to be of value and significance.
Thus, the curtest expression of humanity's notion of true success may be this: To do something that matters so that we might know that we matter. Put differently, to make something worthy happen, and, in the process, to enhance our own name.
But just as passionately as humans everywhere seek success, we instinctively seek to avoid even the faintest trace of failure.
âIf at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried,â one humorist quipped. Indeed, whole industriesâpublic relations, advertising, and the legal profession among themâstrive to destroy the evidence and to clear the scents and stains of failure from our individual and corporate names.
The difference between being a cause of a failure and being a failure is too subtle for most people's comfort. In their calculations, they must avoid failure at any cost.
But what if failure is inextricably a part of the DNA of even the most successful peopleâof organizations, presidents, chief executive officers (CEOs), and celebrities?
In recent years, failure has undergone something of a public relations makeover of its own: For a rare time in history, theorists and practitioners of leadership confess to the practical value of failure along the path to success. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs boast of how they embrace failure and wear their past failures as badges of honor.
However, neither the person who flees from any risk of failure nor the person who glorifies it does it proper justice.
Although so many management experts and self-help gurus today speak excitedly of the value of failure, we feel some honesty is in order: Many failures are fatal.
Leadership as Playing with FireâThe Very Fire of the Gods
Although the leader should learn some of the playful, inventive spirit of a Thomas Edison, one should always be mindful of the difference between playing with building blocks and playing with matches. Although failure can create a new path, no one should speak glibly of the destruction that it may entail.
Humanity has been ambivalent about fire since its earliest days. Failure should be viewed in the same cautionary light.
In various myths and legends, the gods see fire as something humanity is unworthy of, or incapable of handling. Like the god Vulcan's fires, failure is capable of causing both great benefit and final destruction.
The Romans hailed Vulcan as a blacksmith and craftsman who could coax fire and steel into producing beautiful things. They simultaneously dreaded the withering blaze of fire that might lay all they loved to waste. It was not by accident that the temples of Vulcan, and their attendant bonfire sacrifices, were placed outside major population centers.
Failure may also be identified with the eminent god Shiva of Indian tradition, whose cosmic dance brings both destruction and renewal. Shiva, fittingly, is associated closely with Agni, the Hindu and Buddhist god of fire. (And Agni, in a fittingly terrifying fashion, was the name given to India's first long-range nuclear weapon.)
A willingness to fail can be liberating, and a fear of failing calamitous. We can think of countless coaches or leaders who had a great many assets working in their favor, but who, in playing not to lose, unwittingly opened the door for doubt, timidity, and, ultimately, failure.
Fortune or luck plays the greatest role in any leader's career, Machiavelli argued. Yet he did not portray fortune as something to be accepted meekly and passively. Rather, he considered it something that the leader must be audacious enough to push and cajole. This is in sharp contrast to the excessive caution that we see among most contemporary managers.
At the same time, we want to be stone-cold sober about the matter: Falling a short distance may allow us to try again tomorrow. Falling a great distance will not.
mulligan (muhl-ih-guhn)
In golf, a shot that is repeated without penalty. Often permitted in informal competition.
However, we must recognize that mulligans are rare in most aspects of professional life. A pilot has only one chance to land himself and his passengers correctly. No sane patient wants to be placed under the blade of a surgeon who thinks, âIf I fail today, I'll learn something for the next case.â No reasonable investor sinks savings into a new enterprise whose managers are content to experiment casually in a way that increases the chance of bankruptcy.
As the old advertising adage attributed to John Wanamaker goes, âHalf the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.â In the same way, no one knows with certainty which failures are likely to be inevitable, which are likely to be beneficial, and which will destroy you. The leader must recognize, though, that not all failures are equalâand not all are equally surmountable.
Of course, one of our major goals is to tamp down the anxieties of the leader or entrepreneur who suspects that any risk taking might be fatalâbecause risk taking and setbacks are necessary for most all leaders. And if we took the threads that make up the typical successful leader, those threads would contain a far greater amount of failure than we realize. In fact, they contain more failure than success. We can liken it to how even an excellent hitter in baseball fails to get on base the vast majority of the time.
Although we have the popular notion of the Paul Bunyanâlike hero who pushes or cajoles Destiny in new directions, the subtler reality is twofold: First, the successes of the so-called hero depend more on other people's actions than we commonly realize. Second, the hero is less potent than the common iconographies suggest.
Leadership, thus, is best seen as a mysterious and oftentimes unquantifiable thing, rather than a science, social science, or any sort of formulaic craft. This is why Bennis and Sample titled the leadership seminar that we cotaught for 16 years âThe Art and Adventure of Leadership.â
Many scholars and pundits have offered an anatomy of a particular failure in some realm of history or business. We propose here to explore the anatomy of failure itself.
Leaders will mature as they are able to look, without flinching, into the dark abyss of failure. Crucially, they must see that the abyss is more than a general darkness. It is a variegated world that they must understand at a deep level.
In fact, success and failure within leadership involve some paradoxical but eye-opening realities:
- In leadership, most everything is situational and contingent. There are no easy answers or formulas. The contingency principle demonstrates, repeatedly through history, that what works in one context at one time won't necessarily work in a different context or even in the same context at a different time.
- We can attribute the greatest part of a leader's success to forces outside his or her controlâto inscrutable fortune. Above all, the leader must be lucky, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote in his sixteenth-century book, The Prince.1 Yet often there are ways to make one's luck that often involve how one manages one's failures.
- Some institutions or people can fail so often that they do more harm than good most of the timeâyet, on average, do more good than harm. Or the reverse can be true. So the legacy of a person who has failures in his or her past is a complex one.
It Depends: The Contingency Principle in Action
American society appropriately reveres George Washington. In fact, if more Americans properly understood his role in the shaping of the modern democratic experiment, he would be even more deeply appreciated. Yet, bearing in mind the contingency principle, we are also certain that being Washington, or being like Washington, is not a universally applicable recipe for success in leadership. Washington was the person for his time and his dutyânot necessarily for any other time or duty.
Take, too, the case of the late Steve Jobs. No modern management figure is as envied and admired. Yet Jobs's controversial style would fail spectacularly if he had presided over a more collaborative or less authoritarian work environment than Apple during his tenure....
