China Daily Asia Weekly - Failure holds the key to success

Failure is not something to fear but something to embrace, learn from and leverage into a powerful motivator.
This message was a constant one throughout the World Business Forum in Hong Kong on June 2 and 3, which brought together global business and economic leaders to share their insights to an audience of more than 1,200 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.
“When you don’t give up, you cannot fail,” was one of the slogans in a video shown by George Kohlrieser, a leadership thinker who draws on his experience as a psychologist and veteran hostage negotiator. He wowed the audience with an inspirational message of thoughtful leadership.
The point is, he said, that leaders learn from their failures as much as they do from their successes.
“The day you stop learning is the day you stop being a leader,” said Kohlrieser, who is also a professor of leadership and organizational behavior at the IMD business school in Lausanne, Switzerland.
A half dozen other speakers at the event also echoed this message.
Among them was Sarah Lewis, a faculty member at Yale’s School of Art, best-selling author and an adviser on US President Barack Obama’s arts policy committee. She recounted story after story of famous overachievers who were not held back by adversity but rather empowered by it.
Among them was Martin Luther King, one of the United States’ most influential civil rights activists, who received low grades in school for public speaking before going on to rally a nation with his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Another example Lewis gave was Ben Saunders, a British endurance athlete and the first person to walk to the South Pole, who was told in school that he lacked the drive to accomplish anything significant.
The focus of the two-day forum was on the thinking of world-class leadership experts, but the event was also an opportunity to discuss broader economic topics, thanks to the presence of Ben Bernanke, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve and the man who oversaw the US economy during the global financial crisis.
Now an economist at the Brookings Institution and an adviser at hedge fund firm Citadel, he recounted the fateful weekend leading up to Sept 15, 2008, when the storied investment bank Lehman Brothers went bust despite efforts to save it.
“The goal, the idea, was to do what we did with Bear Sterns and have another company acquire Lehman Brothers and take over the liabilities,” he recounted, but no likely buyers were found.
Bear Stearns was a New York-based global investment bank that failed in the global financial crisis and was subsequently sold to JP Morgan Chase.
Bernanke did engineer another rescue, however, the $85 billion bailout of insurer AIG.
“AIG lost money in certain divisions of the company but it had a whole lot of assets, including insurance subsidiaries, that it could use as collateral for the loan,” Bernanke said.
To this day, he believes the bailouts of Wall Street firms were necessary to avert an even greater crisis, despite negative public opinion.
“We knew there was not going to be a whole lot of support, political or otherwise, for our efforts to avoid the crisis,” he said. “The financial crisis was finally brought to an end, but then we had to face a deep recession.”
Seven years later, the US economy is driving global growth and, said Bernanke, is on a solid footing despite a couple of weak quarters that he attributed to variable factors such as weather. The real challenge for the world economy is the slowdown in the other big drivers of growth: Europe and China.
“The risk of being dragged back by the global slowdown is certainly there,” he said, but he also pointed out that people tend to be too pessimistic.
Bernanke highlighted how the yuan is now “better aligned”, despite criticism that it might be undervalued. His comments echoed similar statements by the International Monetary Fund, which said late last month that the currency is now at fair value.
He also noted how China is undergoing changes that should make it a stronger economy, moving from a top-down approach to growth to one led by the market, a hallmark of a large and sophisticated economy.
“The private sector is where all these changes have to come about,” he said.
In this new economy, the private sector is emerging as a key player and effective corporate leaders are more important than ever.
Throughout the conference, themes emerged in terms of leadership in times of uncertainty, said Steve Mullinjer, regional leader for Asia Pacific at Heidrick & Struggles, an executive search firm that was one of the sponsors of the forum.
“The world is becoming more of a VUCA environment,” he said. VUCA refers to volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity — key words that help define the business environment today.
The emergence of Asia as a global force is a factor in this. Two decades ago, global corporations made less than 20 percent of their earnings in Asia but now the percentage is above 50 percent.
“There are a lot of companies in Asia that are on the cusp of becoming global,” Mullinjer said. The most successful of these are going to be the ones that adapt to global realities and embrace diversity of thinking in their corporate culture.
Other high-profile guest speakers included Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, film director Oliver Stone, scholar and consultant Mohanbir Sawhney, and Don Peppers, founding partner of the consultancy Peppers & Rogers Group.
For the past 11 years, the World Business Forum has been a source of inspiration, learning and transformation for business leaders. Since its inception, it has been held in Europe and the Americas.
Last year, the forum opened for the first time in Sydney, Australia, and proved a great success. This is the first year it has been held in Hong Kong.
Australian event organizer Business Executive Education is behind the forum’s move into Asia.
In a statement, Alberto Saiz, CEO of the event company, said: “The World Business Forum has been held for over a decade in Europe and the Americas. Hong Kong has seen its role as a rapidly increasing international business hub in Asia.”
The overall concept of the conference is to discuss new ideas, pointed out Kohlrieser, asking: “What are the ideas that are on the cutting edge?
“Looking at the history with Steve (Wozniak), looking at the future with Tom (Peters) and looking at the creativity,” he said.

Source: http://www.chinadailyasia.com/2015-06/05/content_15272868.html