In the past, Charney had accused this man of shaking him down and making bogus legal claims.
The lawyer he chose to represent him in his lawsuits happened to be the same one who’d already sued Charney close to half a dozen times for sexual harassment and financial irregularities. His personal life was splashed across the headlines and embarrassing details revealed. He rejected both options and picked something much worse.Īfter filing a lawsuit in protest, he gambled his entire ownership in the company to initiate a hostile takeover with a hedge fund and insisted that his conduct be investigated and judged. After losses of some $300 million and numerous scandals, the company offered him a choice: step aside as CEO and guide the company as a creative consultant (for a large salary), or be fired. Not when they experience heartrending failure.Īmerican Apparel’s founder Dov Charney is an example.
It’s not often that successful or powerful people are able to do this. He worked until he’d not only proven himself again, but significantly resolved the flaws that had caused his downfall to begin with. Humble for CEOs convinced of their own genius, anyway. Steve Jobs, the famous egomaniac who parked in handicap parking spaces just because he could, responded in this critical moment in a surprising way. He started another company after that too, called Pixar. He tried to learn as best he could from the management mistakes at the root of his first failure. But then he started a new company and threw his whole life into it. When he lost, he sold all but a single share of his stock in Apple and swore never to think of the place again. Now Steve Jobs’s response to his firing was understandable. If you were John Sculley and CEO of Apple, you’d have fired that version of Steve Jobs too-and been right to do so. His ego was unequivocally out of control.
Due to his later success, Apple’s decision to fire him seems like an example of poor leadership, but he was, at the time, unmanageable. He was 100 percent responsible for his firing from Apple. Fighting desperately for something we’re only making worse. Ego asks: Why is this happening to me? How do I save this and prove to everyone I’m as great as they think? It’s the animal fear of even the slightest sign of weakness. These are not rational, good emotions that will lead to rational, good actions. It might feel as if you’ve been betrayed or your life’s work is being stolen. Let’s say the walls feel like they’re closing in. And so we throw good money and good life after bad and end up making everything so much worse. It’s a fear of taking responsibility, of admitting that we might have messed up. The problem is that when we get our identity tied up in our work, we worry that any kind of failure will then say something bad about us as a person. This is all perfectly fine it’s what being an entrepreneur or a creative or even a business executive is about. They have grand and bold visions that were a little too grandiose. They start companies they think they can manage. If at any point he’d said: Is this the person I want to be? He found himself in a hole and kept digging until he made it all the way to hell. There’s also no question about who made it so much worse. There’s no question about who caused John DeLorean’s disintegration. Sure, after his publicized and very embarrassing arrest, DeLorean was eventually acquitted on the charges on the rather implausible argument of “entrapment.” Except he is on video, holding up a baggie of cocaine, saying with giddy excitement, “This stuff is as good as gold.” That’s right, after his company began to fail-failure almost exclusively tied to his unprofessional management style-he figured the best way to save it all would be to secure financing through an illegal shipment of 220 pounds of cocaine.
The ego is the enemy series#
Instead he put in motion a series of events that would end in a $60 million drug deal and his subsequent arrest.
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