In 1888, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche stated, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Nowhere is that more true than in the world of business, and no one knows it better than veteran CEO Jack Truong, whose meritorious three-decade-plus career has been marked by a series of stellar triumphs, but also, as he’s readily willing to admit, its share of setbacks. Truong contends, however, it’s how you deal with setbacks that ultimately makes the difference between being sucked irrevocably into a downward spiral or stepping back, understanding what went wrong, finding the strength to regroup, and eventually rising to greater heights.
“When you run into an obstacle, rather than continuing to hit that wall and the obstacle, you look around to find a new path,” Truong told CEO Magazine. “Every setback has been a huge learning experience that has helped propel me to the next opportunity … If you don’t fail, you don’t really learn.”
Jack Truong cautions if you’re recycling the same strategy you’ve previously used for a second — or even third — bite of the apple, simply “trying again” won’t necessarily put your business on the path to success and may, in fact, lead to further failure. Truong believes until you truly understand where you got your signals crossed in the first place, learn from your mistakes, and correct your future course, you’re likely doomed to miss the mark no matter how many times you attempt to move forward.
Applying a Scientific Approach to Business Success
Thomas Edison, one of the 19th century’s most prolific inventors and successful businessmen, once said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” Truong credits his engineering background in research and development with teaching him that trial and error is just part of the process of transforming a creative concept into a working model. Making mistakes and be comfortable with learning from mistakes can actually be a vital part of the equation.
Sometimes, it’s understanding why something isn’t working — or why something that once worked is now failing — that leads to positive solutions more useful and profitable than originally hoped for or anticipated. While at 3M and Electrolux, Jack Truong invoked an “out of the ashes” mentality and was able to transform floundering product lines — Post-it Notes and home appliances, respectively — into market leaders to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue growth.
The coming of the digital age was inevitable; however, when it came to handwritten Post-it Notes, Truong saw an underexploited opportunity that held the potential to turn things around. “We found people still wanted to be able to leave messages, but not always on paper,” he told CEO Magazine. “Sometimes, they wanted to stick a note to a computer screen, to a chair, or a cubicle wall.” Since the then-current adhesive hadn’t been designed to adhere to nonpaper surfaces, Truong and his team went back to the drawing board. “We invented a new-to-the-world adhesive that did [stick, and] then we made them into very catchy colors so that people wouldn’t miss them.” The world, indeed, took note. “All of a sudden, the business took off significantly, because we created new applications to address the unmet needs of consumers.”
Truong performed similar feats at Electrolux, homing in on consumers’ unmet needs while tapping into the venerable appliance brand’s underdeveloped, yet-to-be-mined core strengths. As president and CEO of Electrolux’s North American division, Truong elevated the company from third place in its market sector to second and more than doubled its market capitalization.
Notable Failures and the Lessons Future Business Leaders Can Learn From Them
According to a 2010 report from the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, “The idea that endeavors can have outcomes other than those originally planned is not novel. [Eminent sociologist] Robert K. Merton is credited with popularizing the concept of unanticipated consequences. In his 1936 paper, Merton listed possible causes of unanticipated consequences — ignorance, error, overriding of long-term interest by immediate interest, basic values that require or prohibit action, and self-defeating prophecy.” Although the findings were based on data relating to health care technology, the conclusions the authors drew regarding “the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men,” as poet Robert Burns wrote, were universally applicable to any business enterprise.
Although the Ford Motor Company’s remarkably unremarkable Edsel and Coca-Cola’s woefully misguided New Coke most often spring to mind, the business landscape is littered with examples of snappy ideas that went awry — and a few memorable cases of seemingly innovative concepts that crashed and burned in spectacular fashion. While there’s no hard data on how many ventures have failed when they were on the cusp of success, hindsight offers some valuable clues, the cautionary tale of Kodak being a case in point.
With a storied history that dates back to the 1890s, the company that once held the lion’s share of the camera market was ironically sunk by one of its own inventions, the digital camera. Rather than developing the technology, Kodak’s powers that be at the time chose instead to focus on the company’s film line, with disastrous consequences. Exacerbated by a series of poor diversification strategies, Kodak’s failure to foresee the coming digital age of cameras — and later, the near-ubiquitous market saturation of the smartphone — was its eventual undoing. In 2012, the once-powerful firm filed for bankruptcy. Without Jack Truong’s visionary leadership to guide them in a new direction, 3M’s Post-it Notes and Electrolux’s North American home appliance division could easily have suffered similar fates.
When an Irresistible Force Meets an Unmovable Object
According to Merton’s theory of unanticipated consequences, even with imagination, careful planning, and conscientious implementation, things don’t always turn out as planned — not because a concept wasn’t sound or a vision wasn’t inspired, but rather because other factors ultimately influenced the final outcome. As a global CEO with an enviable track record of success, Jack Truong learned to recognize and navigate perilous waters, but even he was forced at times to disengage from a particular battle to win a larger war.
Under Jack Truong’s visionary stewardship, James Hardie Industries underwent a metamorphosis that saw the company transform from a business-to-business firm supplying builders with basic materials to a top-flight business-to-consumer leader that took advantage of the burgeoning home building market, and per CEO Magazine, resulted in a “180-degree pivot that allowed the company to evolve from a one-dimensional to multidimensional company — and to grow from a market capitalization of around $4.5 billion to $18.5 billion in three years.” Even so, Truong was let go under contentious circumstances.
Numbers don’t lie and neither do they account for the full measure of any given situation. Regarding his exit from James Hardie Industries — the elephant in the room — Truong is philosophical. Much like the plot device in Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1950 film Rashomon, in which three characters detail the same set of events from their own perspectives resulting in three very different “truths,” while he attributes the split to a faction of the old guard’s unwillingness to change, Truong accepts their parting of ways will be regarded from more than one point of view.
“Even though more than 99% of employees supported the transformational initiatives that I was leading, there were a few legacy employees who didn’t like all the big changes and new ways of doing things,” he explained.
Jack Truong has made his peace with the Hardie disappointment and moved on. He says he plans to incorporate these latest lessons learned the hard way into his strategy for the future. “I wish nothing but success for the people of James Hardie,” he affirmed. “Through the good and the bad, I can’t say enough about the brilliant and hard working people I’ve worked with, thousands of incredible customers we provided products for, hundreds of engaged investors and equity analysts, and countless memories I have been able to make.
“For that, I am truly grateful and honored for the opportunity. Now, I look forward to making bigger impacts in companies that I work with. Having led successful business transformations at 3M, Electrolux, and most recently James Hardie, I will continue to prioritize innovation, disruption, and efficiency to achieve optimal results while simultaneously establishing long-term stability.”
