Failed Leaders: What We Learn from Disaster

Nokia once owned almost half the world’s phone market. Blockbuster had thousands of buzzing stores. Theranos was valued in the billions. None were small, foolish, or underfunded. So how do leaders steer giants straight into disaster—and why do smart people follow them?

“Seventy percent of corporate transformations fail—mostly because of how leaders behave.” That’s not a cynical tweet; it’s Harvard Business Review’s data. So if failure is this common, the interesting question isn’t “How did they mess up?” but “Why did they keep going when the warning lights were clearly on?”

In careers, we often meet these warning lights first as small, uneasy moments: the metric that doesn’t fit the success story, the junior colleague who raises a concern and gets sidelined, the strategy meeting where dissent suddenly goes quiet. These aren’t just organizational quirks; they’re early signs of deeper fractures in judgment, culture, and ethics.