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The Triumph of Failure

By
Niall O'Dowd,
IrishCentral.com Staff Writer

Published Tuesday, March 10, 2009, 1:30 AM
Updated Thursday, July 23, 2009, 6:04 PM

See more: Opinion  

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08-10

WHEN Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Jack Welch appear on the front cover praising your book, you know you have a winner on your hands.

The book is called The Ten Commandments for Business Failure, and when the author of the book is Donald R. Keough, former president of the Coca-Cola Company and now chairman of investment bank Allen and Company, we should not be surprised.

Keough, a former chairman of the board at Notre Dame, is the man who put the Irish back into Notre Dame after decades of lip service. The Keough Institute of Irish Studies at Notre Dame has become a preeminent Irish studies program in the U.S.

He is also the key business leader who successive Irish governments have depended upon to give them the type of advice and leadership that helped create the Celtic Tiger.

What would Keough know about failure, however? He began his extraordinary life as a child of the Depression in a little farm in Iowa, and through a stellar business career rose to the top of the world's leading corporation.

In his life his family was homeless after a fire, his parents struggled mightily to make ends meet and at times never knew where the next meal was coming from, yet he persevered and succeeded.

That's hardly failure in anyone's terms, but Keough, a philosophy major, knows that treating those two impostors success and failure as the same, as Kipling once wrote, allows for a powerful insight into the human condition.

Keough instinctively knows we often learn more from failure than success. He himself instances the 1985 failure of New Coke, a new formula to take over from the flagship Coca-Cola brand. It was a resounding disaster that in any other company would have destroyed the individuals who came up with it.

Not Don Keough, who held up his hand and went on national television to admit his mistakes. How many times do we yearn for that type of honesty from our politicians and leaders?

The result was a massive turnaround and huge success when old Coke was reintroduced. Some even suspected that Keough had manufactured the whole episode.

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See more: Opinion, Columnist, Niall O'Dowd

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