*Leaders would Rather Fail with Honor

The Unmeasured Metric: Why Honor Outlives Profit

At a recent roundtable, I watched a CEO eviscerate his manager:
“I know you tried your best. But your best wasn’t good enough—it bore no fruit.”
His careful phrasing and coiled posture betrayed contempt. Beneath the words lay an indictment: You failed to deliver profits, even if it required cutting corners. Your integrity is worthless without revenue.

This moment crystallizes a modern leadership crisis.

We claim to revere leaders who weather storms and scale summits—yet we discard them when they stumble honorably. Why do we applaud "discernible outcomes" but ignore the moral infrastructure required to achieve them? Why, in an era obsessed with ostentatious gains, has truthfulness become optional?

I understand that leaders must create economic value. But pragmatism reveals a harder truth: The straight path doesn’t always lead to profit. Sometimes markets shift. Sometimes ethics constrain. Sometimes luck evaporates.

Yet in these moments—when spreadsheets bleed red—we glimpse a leader’s soul.

Do they double down on integrity? Or chase success through deception?
Do they dissect failures with humility? Or scapegoat subordinates?

The ancient Greeks understood what we’ve forgotten. As Sophocles warned:

“Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud.”


A leader’s legacy isn’t built on quarterly earnings alone, but on the priceless currency of character:

·         The uprightness to admit “This was my responsibility”

·         The humility to mine wisdom from wreckage

·         The honor that turns defeat into dignity

The CEO I witnessed saw a manager’s “fruitlessness.”
I saw a leader who deserved something rarer than applause:
Respect for refusing to sell his soul.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Becoming Victims of a Single Fictional Narrative (part 2)

Image
The Stolen Narrative: Reclaiming Africa's Soul Our Buried Inheritance Ethiopia—and Africa—possess a  living tapestry  of history: ancestral wisdom in 3,000 tongues, cultures deeper than soil, unity forged through millennia, and pride in the melanin that maps our genesis. These are not relics, but  birthrights . Yet they were  deliberately fractured —not for being too vast, but too unifying. Colonial architects knew: united cultures resist exploitation. The Generation of Lost Stories 70% of Africa is youth (20-35) but 100% were robbed of their roots. Our elders’ truths were silenced by political puppets branding historians "tribalists" or "backward." Western-curated textbooks replaced oral epics. Youth learned  distortion as doctrine : ·    Diversity became division ·          Kinship became suspicion ·          Shared land became "stolen"territory The Weapon...
Read more

Silencing the Empty Viral Shriek in Unison

Image
The Neocolonial Blueprint: Coercion, Collapse, and Collective Defiance Economic Warfare as Policy: From their self-appointed "Central Command," Western powers steer the global ship by force. Economic sanctions are not tools of justice—they are  scalpels  deliberately wielded to cripple vulnerable nations. Starvation becomes strategy. Debt becomes bondage. The result? Sovereign economies bled dry to ensure compliance. Regime Change by Design: Neocolonialists don’t negotiate—they  engineer  chaos: ·          Coups  as corporate takeovers (Guinea, Congo), ·          Conflicts  as profit ventures (Libya, Ethiopia), ·          Isolation  as prelude to predation: singling out nations like wounded prey to be devoured by sanctions and slander. The Unbearable Calculus: Enough.  Africa and the Global South now see the equation clearly: ...
Read more

Menelik II and the Devil’s Device: A Tale of Innovation and Resistance

Image
Menelik II remains one of the most beloved emperors in Ethiopian history—not only for his military triumphs, but for his groundbreaking efforts to modernize the country. He opened the door to technological advancement and enacted numerous reforms that were far ahead of his time. Yet, these efforts did not come without fierce resistance and harsh criticism, much of it from within his own circles. Among the many innovations introduced during his reign, the arrival of the telephone stands out—not just for its novelty, but for the controversy it sparked. This seemingly magical device became a source of both awe and alarm, especially among conservative elements of society, including the clergy. The humorous yet telling confrontations between the visionary emperor and those who opposed his modern reforms are at the heart of this story. According to legendary Ethiopian journalist P’awlos ňo ňo in his book As’e Menelik ( Emperor Menelik ), and noted historian Tekle Tsadik Mekuria in As...
Read more