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are rarely brave enough, or
confident and committed enough
in their ideas, to stake their careers
and reputations on risky game-
changing innovations. The heroic
leader’s strength lies not just in
their vision, but also in their
willingness to stand in the
spotlight when things go wrong.
Corporate history is littered
with examples of failed products.
Most businesses are therefore, by
nature, risk averse. Even Apple has
made mistakes—and, again, its
example is instructive. Jobs may be
best remembered for transforming
the music, computer, and phone
industries, but he’ll also be
remembered as the poster boy for
embracing failure, and bouncing
back from it. He has reigned over
a long list of failures. The Pippen
games console, for example, was
unable to compete with the likes
of Sony’s Playstation, and was
quickly dropped. The Apple III
computer suffered major design
faults, and the Lisa—a computer
that would eventually provide the
basis for the iMac—had poor sales.
The Apple Newton, a forerunner of
today’s smartphones, was a flop.
These failures led to Jobs being
fired in 1985. In a speech to students
graduating from Stanford University
in 2005, Jobs stated that the
dismissal triggered him to change
his own game: “The heaviness of
being successful was replaced by
the lightness of being a beginner
again, less sure about everything.
It freed me to enter one of the most
creative periods of my life.”
History is filled with examples
of trailblazers who stumbled before
finding success. KFC chicken,
invented by Harland David Sanders,
was rejected by more than 1,000
restaurants; R. C. Macy opened and
closed many stores before founding
the largest department store in the
world; Walt Disney’s Laugh-O-Gram
studio went bankrupt in 1923;
and Henry Ford had three failed
businesses before finding success.
Game changers such as Albert
Einstein (labeled “slow” by his
teachers) and billionaire Oprah
Winfrey (told she was not “fit to
be on screen”) seem to defy the
future mapped out for them.Long-term thinking
It is the ability to recover from
failure, and maintain the courage
and conviction to keep changing
the game, that sets great leaders
apart from the rest. From a
strategic point of view, a focus
on game-changing innovationencourages long-term thinking.
Adopting such a strategy means
that shareholders must be tolerant
of risk and uncertainty, and patient
with regard to returns; payback
periods may be long, and rewards
difficult to measure. But if allowed
to flourish, this longer-term approach
enables a business to build a
stronger brand, invest in research
and development, create better
business processes, and avoid
taking (possibly damaging) actions
to boost short-term profits.
As Christensen’s The
Innovator’s Dilemma suggests,
game-changing leaders are not
bound by incremental change and
“me-too” thinking: they rewrite the
terms of competition by embracing
unique ideas, and recognize that
in a corporate world characterized
by the mantra “change or die,”
disrupting the status quo in your
own favor puts you not just one
step, but several steps ahead of
the competition. In today’s
hypercompetitive markets, game-
changing leaders do not simply
outthink, outsmart, and
outcompete their rivals—they
move the goalposts and redefine
the rules of the game. ■LIGHTING THE FIRE
Challenging the status quo
African-American businessman
John H. Johnson had the acumen
to recognize the untapped
potential for publications aimed
at the African-American market.
Excelling at high school despite
an impoverished upbringing,
Johnson won a scholarship to
the University of Chicago and
supported himself with an office
job at an insurance company. It
was while at work that he came
up with the idea for Negro Digest
(later renamed Black World), a
magazine that would featureAfrican-American history,
literature, arts, and culture.
It was a rapid success, reaching
a circulation of 50,000 in only six
months. A second magazine,
Ebony, was founded in 1945, and
at its height reached a circulation
of more than 2 million. Thanks
to his willingness to challenge
the status quo, Johnson built
a publishing empire that
included radio, television, and
books. He was named in the
Forbes 400 list of wealthy
Americans in 1982.You have to be willing
to be misunderstood.
Jeff Bezos
US entrepreneur (1964 –)