When bad things happen to good leaders: Firing back from career disasters
✍ Scribed by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld; Andrew Ward
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2007
- Weight
- 192 KB
- Volume
- 2007
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1087-8149
- DOI
- 10.1002/ltl.241
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
n confronting losses of all types, we are too often faced with trite prescriptions for squeezing the lemons of life into lemonade. For leaders, however, life's adversity can turn hard-earned assets into monumental barriers to recovery. Leaders can enjoy such resources as great popular recognition, vast networks of supporters, and gushing pools of finances. Yet celebrity, popularity, and wealth do not insulate them from fate.
Leaders have no cruise control for coasting on the momentum of recent triumphs. Today's evidence of good fortune could evaporate with tomorrow's events. One moment we can be on top of the world, and the next, trodden underfoot. What's more, many people enjoy seeing those who have been held on a pedestal get knocked down. Just ask Martha Stewart, should you need convincing about the power of schadenfreude or the delight in the humiliation of those we envy. This point is dramatized well for us time and time again in the headlines. Whether it is movie or media stars, artists, politicians, business leaders, or even academics, fascinated attention follows those who fall from grace, who get knocked off their pedestals either through their own slipups or by external overthrow. For many, the derailment of a career of high accomplishment compounds adversity because their path to date has been so all-consuming that much else was sacrificed in its pursuit. Private dreams became public possessions, which are then cavalierly tossed away by an unappreciative, fickle society.