My Greatest Lesson

I've failed many times in my life. When I was young, I played professional baseball. All I dreamed about was someday reaching the major leagues. I went as high as triple-A before I was released - that is, fired. I wasn't happy about that at all. But I got a job at General Foods. After several years of successfully climbing the corporate ladder, I left to start my own business. It took me about three months to go broke in that venture. Since then, my life has been filled with ups and downs.

You've got to keep your successes and failures in perspective. Don't let bad experiences debilitate or demotivate you. Many people berate themselves when they fail. This is the worst thing to do. If you beat yourself up all the time, it's hard to get back in the game. So I tell the people whom I work with never to get too cocky and never to get too depressed.

If you let failure bother you, you'll never succeed. Don't fear failure. Learn from it.

John Peterman successfully owned, operated, and sold several businesses before becoming a mail-order magnate. His company had sales of $65 million in 1997 and plans to open 60 to 80 retail outlets in the next five years. The romance and mystery exuded by the J. Peterman catalog inspired a character on the TV show "Seinfeld."

J.C.Watts
Member, U.S. House of Representatives
Oklahoma, Fourth District
Norman, Oklahoma

I learned my greatest lesson about strategy from my high-school football coach, Paul Bell. During drills on how to call plays, Coach Bell taught me how to create strategy by studying our opponents' tendencies. We would do this by watching hours of game film. Eventually, because I had watched so much film, I could immediately respond to whatever defensive formation the opponents chose - constantly testing our strategy against theirs.

I remember watching a film of one team in particular. The team was running what we called "gadget" or "trick" plays. After about five minutes, Coach Bell stopped the film. He said that when a team runs that many gadget plays, you can assume that it's covering up for a weakness. That truth has stood the test of time, in politics as well as in athletics. Good teams don't need gadget plays.

When you're leading a team, the better you can communicate your strategy to everyone, the better off you and the team will be. More important, the leader is the one person who should never, ever say "quit." Obviously, you can't win them all. But when I was a quarterback, if I could get my team into the two-minute-warning period and within striking distance of a win, I'd take any and every chance I got. And I didn't lose very often.

J.C. Watts was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994. As quarterback for the University of Oklahoma Sooners, he led the team to consecutive Big Eight championships and Orange Bowl victories between 1979 and 1981. In 1992, he was voted into the Orange Bowl Hall of Honor.

Charles Handy
Author and
Social Philosopher
London, England

When I was in my mid-forties, my father died. His death stopped me in my tracks and changed my life. Before he died, I was a hot-shot professor at the London Business School - teaching ambitious young men and women, publishing well-received articles, writing best-selling business books, jetting around the world, lecturing at major universities, consulting for big-name companies. I was on the edge of the big time. And, I have to admit, I was pretty pleased with myself.

My father, on the other hand, had been a quiet and modest man. He had lived most of his life in the Irish countryside, where he'd been the minister of a small church. Secretly I had always been disappointed by his lack of ambition. It was difficult for me to understand his reluctance to move on or up in life.

When he died, I rushed back to Ireland for the funeral. Held in the little church where he had spent most of his life, it was supposed to be a quiet family affair. But it turned out to be neither quiet nor restricted to the family. I was astounded by the hundreds of people who came, on such short notice, from all corners of the British Isles. Almost every single person there came up to me and told me how much my father had meant to them - and how deeply he had touched their lives.

That day, I stood by his grave and wondered, Who would come to my funeral? How many lives have I touched? Who knows me as well as all of these people knew this quiet man?

When I returned to London, I was a deeply changed man. Later that year, I resigned my tenured professorship. More important, I dropped my pretense of being someone other than who I was. I stopped trying to be a hot shot. I decided to do what I could to make a genuine difference in other people's lives. Whether I have succeeded, only my own funeral will tell.

I only wish that I could have told my father that he was my greatest teacher.

Charles Handy is the author of several books, including The Empty Raincoat: Making Sense of the Future (Hutchinson, 1994), which has sold more than 1 million copies around the world, and The Hungry Spirit: A Quest for Purpose in the Modern World (Hutchinson, 1997). Handy has also been an oil executive, a business economist, and chairman of the Royal Society of Arts in London.