The Daily Whine

In a month where conflict in the Middle East escalated out of control and Indonesia was revisited by the tsunami horror, it seems a little trivial and insensitive for me to look back on an event that did not end in death or injury. But as haunting as images on the evening news continue to look, it’s a sign of my times that I was more troubled by the utter failure of one of the business events we were charged with handling.

To be brief, we were tasked to organize the press launch of a new line of product in this market, and this work broke down into both event construction as well as media handling. This was an important event for the client, not just because it represented a new market opportunity, but also because they had guests from global headquarters come to visit. The long and short of it was, the event went badly. Construction was a mess, the finishing was below expectations, and the guests were underwhelmingly impressed. On the bright side, the media side went well, but there is no grace for a job half-done.

The uncomfortable aftermath was the least we, as a professional outfit, could expect. The client was embarrassed in front of their guests, and we had egg on our faces. To be fair, the event went smoothly and the press didn’t notice anything amiss, but the name of the game is perception, and in the client’s eyes, there’s no mistaking a fuck-up the size of Alaska, even if Alaska is carpeted under a blanket of snow.

We’ve traded plenty of apologies for vitriol, and the relationship’s gone chilly (that DuPont windbreaker’s gonna come in handy). The priority is now damage containment, immediate rectification work, and planning for worst-case scenarios. I’ve done a few simulations and none of the viable outcomes involve a continuation of our event-management business.

The hardest thing to do right now is manage the repercussions with dignity. It’s natural to feel varying degrees of anger, disappointment, disgust, shame, regret and disorientation; but calm, poise, control and grace are responses far less intuitive to summon. In post-mortem with a member of the event-management team, I came up against a defensiveness that was mis-timed and misplaced. Even as I understood his need to mitigate failure, I struggled to contain my wrath at such defiance and denial of its severity. What stood between me and him was a huge chasm of accountability — not whether one felt accountable for what happened, but rather what that accountability entailed. In his mind, accountability was having to explain why things happened the way they did. In mine, accountability was to accept without argument the evidence of failure and the responsibility of atoning for it. (This in part was because I was a sportsman and I understood that
success was determined solely by one’s performance on the day, and one
made hefty preparations in order to give oneself the largest possible
advantage at the race or match, but ultimately the only fact that
mattered was whether one won or lost. Reasons explain nothing — you
either succeed or you fail. You pre-empt defeat with preparation, but if you lose, you lose).

I did ask myself, under such circumstances, why should calm and dignity be preferable and even necessary? The stock answer is to question: Can a manager afford to lose his temper and still retain his control over the situation? Conventional wisdom suggests that emotional control is the most important cue to the restoration of confidence in a setback.

As I am finding out, it’s not easy for a manager to be both humble in failure and dignified in humiliation without appearing impotent to those who judge his actions, and those who follow his cue. My cultural programming insists that I handle defeat with grace, honesty and restraint, even at the expense of missing an opportunity to explain its cause. In a furiously dynamic, competitve and unforgiving landscape, that’s a huge disadvantage when the others at the table don’t share your values. It can come across as a surrendering of leverage, and it can come back to haunt you long after the original sin. They probably don’t teach this at Harvard Business School, and for good reason.

Yet I remain convinced more than ever that without grace under fire, and without diginity to illuminate one’s path through setbacks, then any endeavour — especially in the cold, calculating business of business — is a meaningless pursuit, for there is only gain, but never growth.