Think about this: we have inspirational stories—both real and imaginary—of people who went from extreme poverty to mega wealth, from alarming sickness to obsessive health freaks, and from ignorance to wisdom. However, we don’t even bother making up stories of bosses who went from terrible to amazing. If we did, they would probably be classified as science fiction. In contrast, and as earlier chapters have demonstrated, there is no shortage of real-life examples for leaders who were great until they deteriorated. The pathway from good to bad seems much easier than the one going from bad to good.

I was also told that a brand-new CEO shouldn’t be trying to make huge acquisitions. I was “crazy,” as one of our investment bankers put it, because the numbers would never work out and this was an impossible “sale” to the street.

The banker had a point. It’s true that on paper the deal didn’t make obvious sense. But I felt certain that this level of ingenuity was worth more than any of us understood or could calculate at the time. It’s perhaps not the most responsible advice in a book like this to say that leaders should just go out there and trust their gut, because it might be interpreted as endorsing impulsivity over thoughtfulness, gambling rather than careful study. As with everything, the key is awareness, taking it all in and weighing every factor—your own motivations, what the people you trust are saying, what careful study and analysis tell you, and then what analysis can’t tell you. You carefully consider all of these factors, understanding that no two circumstances are alike, and then, if you’re in charge, it still ultimately comes down to instinct. Is this right or isn’t it? Nothing is a sure thing, but you need at the very least to be willing to take big risks. You can’t have big wins without them.

Author and Dartmouth Tuck School of Business professor Sydney Finkelstein completed the largest research project ever on leadership failure, for his groundbreaking book, Why Smart Executives Fail. According to Finkelstein, true failure - “spectacular failure” - is the result of a series of destructive behaviors (seven, to be precise) that executives in failing companies exhibit:

1. They see themselves and their companies as dominating their competitive environments, even if this view is out of step with reality.

1. They identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their own self-image and interests and the company’s image and interests.

1. They think they have all the answers, often impressing others with the speed and decisiveness with which they deal with significant issues.

1. They make sure that everyone is 100 percent behind them, ruthlessly eliminating anyone who disagrees with their views.

1. They are the consummate company spokesperson, obsessed with managing the image of their company and themselves, often devoting the largest portion of their time to image management.

1. They underestimate fundamental major obstacles, treating them instead as temporarily impediments to be simply removed or circumvented.

1. They stubbornly rely on what worked for them in the past, clinging to the strategies and tactics that made them successful in the first place.

In 1992, Margaret Wheatley published a book called Leadership and the New Science, based on her work with organizations and leaders on what is effective, through a lens

of quantum physics, biology, and chaos theory. Her key learnings were that:

• everything is about relationships, critical connections;

• chaos is an essential process that we need to engage;

• the sharing of information is fundamental for success; and

• vision is an invisible field that binds us together, emerging from relationships and chaos and information.

As former Intel CEO Andy Grove wrote in his influential book Only the Paranoid Survive, “Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction.” CEOs who make it to the Complacency Trap stage have navigated the rough-and-tumble of the Launch, Calibration, and Reinvention stages of the first few years. One unintended consequence of leading their firms adroitly can be an overly assured attitude about the course they’ve set and the organizational improvements they’ve made.