{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Fit Happens: Why CEOs and Leaders Succeed or Fail","title":"Why Boards Screen Out the Wrong Kind of Risk","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1451,"description":"Does a leader's public failure actually tell you less than their quiet success?\nHere's a scenario I run into constantly in executive search: two final candidates for a CEO role, one with a spotless record, one with a very public failure in their past. The easy move is to screen out the second person. I think that instinct deserves a lot more scrutiny than it usually gets, and this episode is my attempt to work through why.\nDrawing on research across sectors, including studies on founder performance, star analysts who change employers, and the real effectiveness of after action debriefs, I unpack why some people genuinely learn from failure and others just become defensive, or recover and repeat the same mistake. I walk through the case of Ron Johnson's move from Apple to JC Penney as a fit question rather than a simple failure story, and I lay out a three part framework for separating an examined failure from an unexamined one: an accurate account of what happened, deliberate work to understand it, and a change in behavior that other people can actually confirm.\nThis matters directly to CEO recruitment and to how boards approach hiring a CEO. It also matters to anyone evaluating their own career after something didn't go to plan. I talk about the asymmetry in incentives that pushes search professionals and boards toward the safer, more conventional record, and why that asymmetry can cause us to overlook real executive fit. I also touch on fairness, including research showing CEO dismissals differ by gender, and where the line sits between a good faith error and genuine misconduct.\nKey takeaways:\nFailure is not one thing. A recession, a bad acquisition, a boardroom disagreement and concealment of results all get labeled failure, but they reveal completely different things about a leader's judgment.\nSuccess deserves the same scrutiny as failure. Ask what a leader actually contributed versus what they inherited from the team, market, or momentum.\nProperly conducted...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/0AtGMO0HN5UCZe2_wf8pfE5Ad7xGwtuc4BOCVD_dVlA/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8yNTdl/MDY2MDQyMDAzMmFk/MWIzNjMwMzMwZjFh/NTRmMS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}