Forbes® Best Business Mistakes: How Today's Top Business Leaders Turned Missteps into Success

Conclusion

If you have read some or all of these profiles, I hope they've had the same effect on you as they've had on me. I somehow feel less like a loser to discover that even the most esteemed business leaders make mistakes. Yet in an interesting paradox, I also find myself more impressed. I came away with more respect for them since their career tracks weren't cleared for them like curling players sweeping the path of the stone on its way to the house. They succeeded not just despite the roadblocks they encountered, but in many cases because of them.

Since many of these business leaders are good managers, part of their success may be due to their ability to manage a mistake. As former Heisman Trophy winner turned businessman John Cappelletti told me, good managers are solving problems every day. Those problems really never stop coming, whether ones of their own making, those of their employees, or perhaps ones from the marketplace. Overcoming and dealing with problems is part of their ongoing task set and it's quite possible that a mistake, even one that can threaten a career, is encountered as just another problem to solve on the way to achieving career or personal goals.

Perhaps the smartest way to turn a mistake into a potentially positive situation is to change your perception of it. Mistakes can be agents of change. And such change can be for good or bad. The bad mistakes are the ones we would probably like to forget, and the good ones can affect our lives and/or careers ...