Narrating failure

Abstract

Hot Seat: What I Learned Leading a Great American Company by Jeff Immelt with Amy Wallace Avid Reader Press, 340 pp. With the pervasive positivism that dominates and, in doing so distorts, much of leadership discourse (Collinson, 2013), it is easy to forget that leaders fail at least as often as they succeed. Gareth Southgate’s English footballers failed to capture the European Championship. Angela Merkel’s once dominant Christian Democratic Union found itself far less dominant after Germany’s 2021 state elections. David Cameron’s side lost in the Brexit vote. Expedia’s board pressured CEO Mark Okerstrom to resign. And CEOMichael J. Nicholson filed for bankruptcy on behalf of J. Crew. Readers of this journal may well remain dubious about the degree to which these individuals were solely accountable for such failures. J. Crew and the entire retail industry were, after all, besieged by myriad long-standing and widespread problems and challenges. Yet observers and leaders alike tend to adhere to a simple, even simplistic, but nonetheless powerful formulation: a failure of a unit is a failure of the unit’s hierarchical leader. When a team, a business, a campaign, and so on fails, the leader has somehow and in some significant way failed. Observers think that. So, for the most part, do leaders themselves. In order to penetrate that fog of pervasive positivism, we can and should look at how leaders experience failure. But what are the avenues for doing that? Here, the CEO memoir proves useful. A certain template was established in Lee Iacocca’s eponymous 1984 best seller (Spector, 2013, 2017). That was an act of narration, and certainly self-promotion, that adhered rigorously to the classic path of a hero’s journey delineated by Campbell (1968). Since then, one CEO after another has rushed into print, sometimes immediately after, occasionally during, their tenure, to celebrate their heroic triumphs (e.g., Dell, 2021; Knight, 2016; Trump, 1987;Walton, 1992;Welch, 2001). They are all the heroes of their own narratives, yet failure is a common component of their stories Early in the hero’s journey, there will be a major setback. Iacocca, for instance, opened his story with an apparently humiliating and very public sacking by his old boss, Henry Ford II. The setback in a hero’s journey is presented as a disruption or complication in the status quo: no early setback, no journey to triumph. It is that very journey that transforms the protagonist into a “hero.” But while failure is a feature of any hero story—how else to demonstrate agency than to personally overcome early defeats?—Jeff Immelt’s Hot Seat offers a markedly different narrative structure. Iacocca’s defeat occurred early in his career, providing lots of opportunity for later triumph. Immelt’s business career finished in failure. “My tenure,” he acknowledges, “ended badly.”