CHAPTER 11
Learning from Failure
Success is going from failure to failure
without loss of enthusiasm.
WINSTON CHURCHILLAs a middle manager was receiving a promotion, his vice presi-
dent cryptically said, “You know what being promoted means,
don’t you? It means your bad decisions do more damage.”
Our having positions of influence means more opportunity to
do good. But it also means that the costs are higher for failure.
No one likes to fail, especially leaders, whose failures produce
magnified consequences. Our errors of judgment, and our failures
of nerve or vision, affect not just ourselves but also our followers
and our cause. Clearly, failure is nothing to take lightly.
Yet as ski instructors frequently tell their novice students, “If
you don’t fall now and then, you’re probably not pushing your-
self enough.”
Failure is the inevitable companion of a large vision. No
one can take on a significant and difficult challenge without
stumbling a few times. The important thing is how we respond.
The goal is not a fail-safe record but a pattern of increasing
effectiveness.
David Aikman, analyzing great individuals who shaped the
twentieth century, said it well: “Virtue, after all, often consists not
so much in the absence of fault altogether as in the speed and
grace with which fault is recognized and corrected.”