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I have spent some time contemplating the failed bid for the Democrat Presidential nomination of Hillary Clinton. Naturally, I also tied thoughts into the failed bid for the Presidency by Al Gore in the 2000 election. While Al Gore won the popular vote, he lost the election by the Electoral College vote following the Supreme Court decision of the Florida recount.

Since 2000, Al Gore has demonstrated that he is anything but a failure. While he never took the oath of the highest office in the United States, he has succeeded in bringing his top political issue to the forefront of American and Global conscience.

Since his political career began with a congressional seat from Tennessee, Al Gore’s public service has been known by one dominating issue – the environment. He was one of the first politicians to hold public hearings on the issue and to publically call for reduction in emissions from carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

After Al Gore failed in his bid for the Presidency in 2000 and left the office of Vice President in 2001, he dusted off a twenty year-old speech and toured the speaking circuit to discuss the issue of saving the environment. In 2006, he turned this speech into an Academy Award winning documentary – An Inconvenient Truth. In 2007, he won the Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

Today, Green Initiatives are commonplace in our business and social arenas. In no small part, this is attributed to Al Gore’s leadership after having failed in his bid for the Presidency.

Quote about Leadership from Al Gore:

“No matter how hard the loss, defeat might serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out.”

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Robert Francis “Bobby” Kennedy

Today is the day that 40 years ago Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. I don’t like to refer to these circumstances as anniversaries, because an anniversary is a good occasion like in marriage. The assassination of a leader is a dark circumstance in our nation’s history.

Bobby Kennedy, as he was known, was the younger brother of President John F. Kennedy and served as US Attorney General during his brother’s administration. From 1965 until his assassination, was a US Senator from New York. In the early morning hours of June 5th, 1968, he won the California Democrat Primary and after giving his speech he was shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

Bobby Kennedy stood for issues of civil rights, racial and economic justice, against the Vietnam War, and supporting foreign policy of non-aggression.

Quote about failure from Bobby Kennedy:
“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

Blogging about failure on a website about leadership may strike some as odd, but I find it important for leaders to understand the role that failure plays in developing leadership potential.

Below are articles that I have written about failure:

• 3-Steps for How to Respond to Failure
• Achieve Success in a New Year
• Committing to not Fail and Learning to Succeed
• Learning from Failure through Interest and Focus with Donald Trump and Winston Churchill
• Persevering and Success after Mistakes and Failures with Peter Drucker and John Maxwell
• Quote about Success and Failure from Sir Winston Churchill
• The Story about a Leader who Failed much but Succeeded in Greatness

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I have always enjoyed the lesson from one individual who failed so much in his life, but in the end was and is regarded as one of the greatest leaders that ever lived.

The Personal Side

He was not well educated, nor did he come from a prominent family. Instead his formal education lasted merely 18 months, was self-taught, even passing the bar exam to become a lawyer, and an avid reading.

He lost his mother when he was merely 9 years old and had to overcome the death of his first sweetheart when he was 26.

Career Failures

This person failed in business when he was 21 years old. When he was 23, he was defeated in his first legislative election race. At 24, he again failed in business and suffered through a nervous breakdown by 27.

He lost two Congressional races when he was 34 and 36 and lost a US Senate race when he was 45. He failed in an effort to become the Vice President when he was 47 and lost another Senate bid the same year.

Success and Greatness

In spite of all of his failures, this person remained determined to succeed and never failed as a leader. You know him and every young person in the United States learns about his leadership at a very young age. Even around the entire world, he is known as a great leader and a shining example for national leadership.

I am writing about the sixteenth President of the United States – Abraham Lincoln.

Quote from Abraham Lincoln about failure:
“The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.”

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Today’s is a quick post, but I’ve found another great quote that nearly sums up everything that I have written about success and failure. You can credit a great man and notable leader with hitting the nail square on the head with a single swing.

Quote about Success and Failure from Sir Winston Churchill:
“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”

Keep failures in perspective: failures happen and then there’s success - fail, persevere, learn, and then succeed.

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Many failures are merely mistakes and everyone makes mistakes. Those who achieve success are those who persevere after mistakes.

A Peter Drucker quote:
“The one person to distrust is the one who never makes a mistake. Either he is a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried, and the trivial.”

I want to share a paragraph out of John C. Maxwell’s book, Failing Forward:

“Every successful person is someone who failed, yet never regarded himself as a failure. For example, Wolfgang Mozart, one of the geniuses of musical composition, was told by Emperor Ferdinand that his opera The Marriage of Figaro was ‘far too noisy’ and contained ‘far too many notes.’ Artist Vincent van Gogh, whose paintings now set records for the sums they bring at auction, sold only one painting in his lifetime. Thomas Edison, the most prolific inventor in history, was considered unteachable as a youngster. And Albert Einstein, the greatest thinker of our time, was told by a Munich schoolmaster that he would “never amount to much.

“I think it’s safe to say that all great achievers are given multiple reasons to believe they are failures. But in spite of that, they persevere. In the face of adversity, rejection, and failings, they continue believing in themselves and refuse to consider themselves failures.”

Many failures are merely mistakes and everyone makes mistakes. Those who achieve success are those who persevere after mistakes. As a leader, it is particularly important to understand this. You don’t cover up mistakes, you acknowledge, learn from, and move past mistakes.

The same is true for your team. Your team members may make mistakes. Don’t make them an example, but lead them to acknowledge what the mistake was, what can be learned from the mistake, and how to move past it.

As the quote from Peter Drucker reminds us, the person you should be weary of is not the one who makes mistakes, but the person who does not make mistakes. Are they trying their best, are they growing as a professional, are they expanding their knowledge and skills, or are they merely stagnant with the tried and true.

Especially, in our demanding economic times, change is constant. You cannot stop change, but you can get out in front and make the most of it. In the process of working with change, you and your team may make mistakes – that’s an indication that you are trying. Now you merely have to respond positively to mistakes – persevere – and don’t allow failures to consume and paralyze you and your team.

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Donald Trump

I was watching a news program a while back and Donald Trump was on the show for a question and answer session with the audience. When asked about his experiences, he provided a lot of tips and suggestions for entrepreneurs to succeed. His tips were varied from getting flack for his hair and handling the necessity of a prenuptial agreement when a relationship becomes a marriage.

Focus

There was one observation which Donald Trump provided that struck a cord with me. When asked about learning from mistakes/failures in his past, he summed his problems up in one point – losing focus. From all of his experiences, from the times when every deal he touched turned to gold to the period when he encountered a negative net-worth of $900 million, all of his mistakes/failures were due to losing focus.

I find this to be true for me. From academic to work goals and even with personal projects, I also tend to lose focus. My many interests distract me. I was never a person who had just one goal or one career or one-track thought-process. I have always been a person who has many different goals, interests, and ambitions.

Even when I was a kid, I remember getting teased by my cousin because I always wanted to be so many things when I grew up – from a professional baseball player and a boxer to a private detective and a soldier. If you read my resume closely, you would probably laugh because I have had some of the careers that I dreamed about as a kid.
I was a soldier and I was a private detective.

Overtime, I learned the importance of focus and now have a lot more success as a result.

Winston Churchill and Interest

By far, the strongest factor in learning and focus is interest. When you have an interest in something, it takes very little effort to learn and focus on it.

Quote about learning from Winston Churchill from his autobiography, A Roving Commission: My Early Life:
“Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.”

Learning is best response to failure. Interest and focus are the most important factors in learning. I have written a lot of about failures on this blog and I will continue to address the topic when I have more value to add to the discussion. The most important point to remember and to teach to others is to not focus on the failure, but to focus on what you can learn from it.

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Great Book

I’ve added another book to my collection that I am quite excited about. Anyone who knows me personally knows that I have great love for books. I picked up The Daily Drucker which is a compilation of the best of Peter F. Drucker that was put together with Joseph A. Maciariello.

The Daily Drucker is “366 DAYS of INSIGHT and MOTIVATION for GETTING the RIGHT THINGS DONE” (leap year included). I intend to go through this book as the writer intended – one day for one passage of the legendary Drucker. What prompted me to buy it was a paragraph in the preface written by Drucker, “But the most important part of this book is the blank spaces at the bottom of its pages. They are what the readers will contribute, their actions, decisions, and the results of these decisions. For this is an action book.

Action

Action is the key. All thoughts, plans, concepts, and ideas are empty without action. You can spend all your time reading and discussing the finer details of leadership, but it will be all for nothing without action. Leadership requires you to go and do. You can only be and become a leader through doing leadership.

There is a famous quote that is a bit controversial because it may be misappropriated to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (read about it here). Nonetheless I like this quote, so I am going to share it with you.

Quote about action from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
 “What you can do or think you can do, begin it—boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

Failure

Don’t let the fear of failure hold you back. Even if things don’t work out quite as you expect, you can still gain a great deal from experience and always remember the 3 Steps for How to Respond to Failure.

Be bold, be a leader, and take action.

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Happy New Year! I hope your holidays were great and were spent with those who matter most – family. A lot of people are going to set goals (resolutions) for the next year and I do believe the beginning of a new year is an excellent time for self-evaluation. You don’t necessarily have to highly critical, but everyone has weaknesses and strengths; the better you understand and deal with those, the better you will be able to achieve your desired success.

Dustin Wax wrote an excellent post at LifeHack.org for 8 Ways to Achieve Success in 2008. Specifically, there were two parts in the post that I really enjoyed:

1. The SMART acronym which is credited to George Doran is an excellent breakdown for developing goals. In short, you should set goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevent, and Time-bound.
2. The step to “accept failure graciously” is, as readers of my blog know, a pertinent point.

 Failure and Success

I wrote an article on October 9th titled 3 Steps for How to Respond to Failure. The article has been widely read for the topic (and the 2nd most popular page on this blog). Failure is a significant topic for a lot of people. I would dare to say that very few people achieve anything of great significance without some set-backs and, most likely, were able to succeed in the end for how the person responded to the failures.

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Persistence

Persistence – the act of enduring despite… regardless of… in the face of… even with… even though… A leader is persistent. If there are setbacks, if there are obstacles, if the going gets tough, a leader is persistent. It’s the act of determination that stems from the depths of confidence and the strength that is derived form experience.

Leadership quote from Peter Drucker:
“It is easy to look good in a boom.”

Right now, in the US, we are faced with the prospect of a recession – technically defined as two or more consecutive quarters of negative growth. So, right now, we need a greater emphasis on leadership in organizations. We need those business man and women, who through experience and knowledge, are able to drive our businesses through this economic period where only select businesses will “look good” while others are merely positioned to endure through this an economic downturn and still others will crumble under the weight of tough times.

It takes leadership to look good in a decline.

Creativity and Innovation

When economic times get tough, then it is time for leaders to rise to the challenge and find creative solutions to the problem. This is not as straight forward as cutting costs or cutting jobs. These, short-term solutions may cause more long-term problems. Sometimes the solution is a realignment, restructuring, or, some other, repositioning of the business.

No “One” solution

There is never a one-size-fits-all solution. Some corporations have a problem of too much money on hand, like Berkshire Hatheway, while others may have cut costs a bit too far and are now losing value, the Dell and Wal-Mart problems.

Leadership

It’s the job of leadership to determine the best path. It’s not as black-and-white as to say the correct path, for there may be more than one correct way to go. Rather, it’s an indeterminate measurement of “best.” It’s a matter of core competence in conjunction with the market’s evolution and countering competition. Sometimes the best answer is to R & D an entirely new product, modify the existing product, or add a service to complement the buyer’s experience. Whatever the “best” answer, the job is leadership.

Rise to the challenge and persist.

Leadership quote from Thomas Edison:
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

The leader does not give up.

For assistance, see Creative Problem Solving for Leadership.

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For a leader, this is critical: when you get knocked down or otherwise lose your standing, get back up and try again.

Leadership quote from John Wanamaker:
“No mistake or failure is as bad as to stop and not try again.”

One of the most important differentiators between leaders and those who do not lead is the response to set-backs, or, what others call, failures.

1. Learn from the experience.

The entire point of “experience” is that you gain knowledge, wisdom, and understanding from it. Employers often measure prospective employees on their experience – what thr have done. The experience demonstrates, that since you have done, are capable of doing again, and capable of doing better.

2. Share what you learn from the experience.

A lot about leadership is sharing your knowledge and experience; otherwise known as mentoring. Your experience and, more specifically, how you grow from your experience, define you. Sharing your experience provides a conduit to influence others. One of the strongest ways to influence others is through what you learn from your experiences.

3. Write and codify how you would keep from failing if you were able to do it again.

Do not spend a lot of time in contemplation about the past, because it is not wise to dwell on history and keep from moving toward the future. However, if you don’t learn from history, you will repeat it. One of the simplest and most powerful methods to learn from your experience is to write out how you would deal with it if you were to repeat it. The act of writing it out places the lesson in your mind for when you encounter a situation or problem that is similar to it. Your writing becomes a plan for dealing with those situations.

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