Successful failure

Success leads to failure if not every time, many times. Everything in life is about success. As an individual, our early childhood behavior and learning abilities have comparative success factors. Our school and university period is all about GPAs, grades and Dean's honour roll. Our work life is about who gets the most coveted job and our marital life is all about how successfully we manage our relationships. Thus success becomes the biggest goal and motivation to move up in life. There is surfeit of success literature in the market. Titles like "How to become a millionaire in 50 days" type stuff becomes hot seller. Undoubtedly such self-development material is useful but the danger of relying too much on it is that it is a quick fix approach that many times may become self-defeating.
In today's world, the profile of a traditional successful leader has come under fire. The successful entrepreneur or CEO was a self-made man or woman whose rise to the ladder of success was matched by the grey in the hair and the number of years of experience behind them. The age and experience combination was given more weightage to select them as successful role models. The Warren Buffet of Hathaway Berkshire Company and Jack Welch of General Electric were the wise guys whom people looked up for advise and inspiration. However this myth has been under challenge especially with the advent of the Silicon Valley billionaires. Bill Gates was the first relatively young success sensation and in the more recent times the online millennial generation has produced many young and dashing CEOs in the billionaire club.
The Facebook revolution by a young CEO is what has marked the emergence of the young upwardly mobile entrepreneurs. The fact that most of them belong to the IT related industry is no surprise as the ability to hatch novel ideas in the virtual world is much cheaper compared to the tangible investments required in the manufacturing domain. From Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, to Even Speigel CEO of Snapchat, to Travis Kalanick, the age ranges between 30-40 years old. Similarly in Pakistan we have dynamic young entrepreneurs in the local ready to wear apparel industry like Shamoon Sultan of Khaadi and Nabeel Abdullah of Saphire. Nine Pakistanis made the Under 30 list of Forbes Under 30 Asia list. This list includes brothers Adnan Shaffi, 28, and Adeel Shaffi, 29, who founded PriceOye in 2015, a price comparison platform for electronics in second and third-tier cities in Pakistan.
This is great news for young upcoming entrepreneurs in the world. Mark Zuckerberg has become the proverbial phenomenon of success at dizzying speed and dizzying height. The dizzying effect is actually the challenge. The sustainability rate of success has also become a challenge. The transition between an entrepreneur and a leader is as dramatic as the transition between a manager and a leader, 70% of recently promoted managers fail in the first eighteen months of employment (source: Leadership IQ). According to a report by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, there have been 1,107 CEO departures in 2017. Four success blinders that need to be addressed are:
- Success breeds failure and many times failure breeds success: It depends on how both sides of the coin are understood, envisioned, responded to and managed. As Jim Collins rightly points out in his book on "How the Mighty Fall", organizations only start pulling back and taking a stock of the situation when decline starts. The most dangerous period of an organization life cycle is not decline but growth. Growth creates a perception of success that creates visual myopia. The drive on how to expand and take advantage of the demand makes the focus shift to scale without creating the capacity to withstand the pressure of the upscaling. Numerous examples of this management folly are available. Recently Facebook's massive 87 million user data leakage has already not only dented its reputation but its market value to the tune of $ 70 billion.
-- Shifting gears: As they say what brought you here will not take you there. When you have a tested, tried recipe that is bringing continuous success, it is very difficult to question it and change it. However, history is replete with examples of late responses to the changes in the market. Nokia and Blackberry who led the mobile phone market were so engrossed in making themselves bigger that they forgot how to make themselves better and, more importantly, smarter. The android technology and the smart and svelte phone blitz by iPhone just knocked them dead.
-- Owning vs leading: Since most of these organizations of the brainchild of these whiz kids they find it difficult to separate themselves from their own babies. They have gone through the pain and labour of delivering the extraordinary creation and are not really willing to let go. This is a complete contrast to the fundamental leadership principle of decentralization and empowerment. The tendency to hover around and supervise all major decisions multiplies the error probability. How is it possible that a man who is good at idea creation is also good at idea development, operation management and commercialization etc.
-- Learning leading: Learning is unsubstitutable and irreplaceable. The concept of leading in the whiz kid category is that here is a young enterprising person who has established this breakthrough industry and thus who could be better to lead all the way. This stunted view on leadership reflects a major mindset ailment. The art and science of leadership is so complex that just dismissing it by saying that since Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were college dropouts who cares about learning, is a major successful failure. These leaders must have certain members in their team to broaden their horizon. They must have a devil's advocate who always opposes set ideas; they must have people from non-related industries who can give them the ideas not being practiced currently; they must have a leadership coach who is just enhancing their ability to inspire, engage, manage talent and teams up at different stages of the business.
Uber founder Travis Kalanick found coping with the dizziness of success too hard to bear as disaster after disaster struck the company in the form of employee scandals etc. He resigned and admitted that he needed leadership coaching. The young and vibrant leaders must learn to ride the business waves instead of letting them ride over you overwhelmed by their own incapacity to build capacity. Embracing success and bracing failure are equally pivotal to sustainable leadership. The biggest learning in leadership is that if success is not permanent, neither is failure. (The writer can be reached at [email protected])