Page 195 - Roy W. Rice - CEO Material How to Be a Leader in Any Organization-McGraw-Hill (2009)

176 • CEO Material: How to Be a Leader in Any Organization

I really don’t want you to succeed too early or too often. You’ll get
lazy, lose your edge, get sloppy, and end up making more mistakes.
The worst time for failure is 20 years down the road into your career,
when you fall flat on your face for the first time and don’t know how to
recover.
Let others around you get into mistakes early too so that you learn
how they handle themselves and they learn from the experience.

When you have a setback, it’s life. When you learn to walk, you fall
a lot—just stand on your feet and walk again.
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Young people are petrified to fail because they were so nurtured by
their parents. They get to the edge of the water but are afraid to wade
in. They want a safe path across.

Missteps, mistakes, and failures will occur. Good for you. That’s how
you grow. If you’re lucky, you’ll run into speed bumps every day. Be pre-
pared for bumps and bruises; scar up a little from the start.
Don’t make the same mistake over and over. If you do something
that doesn’t work, don’t do it again. You get one ticket per issue. Now, this
is true “unless it’s really a fun mistake,” as one CEO advised: “Then you
might want to do it more than once.” (Apparently, this is not necessarily
a recommendation in tennis: A British study found that 44 percent of line
judge calls are wrong.)
Don’t go small; go big. When you decide to take a gamble, double
the risk first. Act like you know what you are doing, stick to it, and give
it plenty of oomph. It looks less foolish to lose big than small. One female
CEO in a public relations and advertising company proudly stated that
she liked to make the biggest mistake possible to get noticed by men.
Prepare for missteps every time you take risks. No path is without
cost. Missteps will happen even with good outcomes.

Recover, get back on track, even leverage them.
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I closed a deal that turned out well. It was a risk I was willing to take,
even though the company was not. I went ahead and did it, and it