Bill Taylor, on his blog at HarvardBusiness.org, has an insightful post piggybacking off a Daniel Gross dispatch from the 2009 World Economic Conference in Davos, Switzerland. Taylor and Gross observe that there seems to be little soul-searching going on at Davos relative to the roots of the worldwide financial mess.   Gross puts it this way: “At least with regard to finance and business, the consensus [at Davos] seems to be clear: Success is the work of Great Men and Great Women, while failure can be pinned on the system.”  Taylor is more blunt:  “So it goes for the world’s economic elite:  We’ll gladly take the credit (and the pay) for good times, but don’t blame us (or deny us our bonuses) when things go sour. Welcome to the no-fault economy!”

While we’re sympathetic to both bloggers’ ire, we believe that those at Davos are just exhibiting a common human tendency.  We’re all simply wired to think highly of ourselves and our efforts, so we don’t dwell on possible failures.  In golf, for example, we all tend to believe that a great drive is the real us, whereas bad ones are aberrations.  In the business world, a long term study of Exxon executives cited by Charles R. Schwenk, in The Essence of Strategic Decision Making (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1988), found that “cognitive maps that explain poor performance contain significantly more assumptions about the environment while those that explain good performance contain more assumptions dealing with the effects of the executives’ actions.” To translate that into English:  If something went wrong, the executives blamed the business climate; if something went right, they took credit.

The unfortunate consequence is all of us, not just the lions of Davos, tend not to learn from our failures, much less share those lessons with others.  In that regards, Bill Taylor offers a valuable set of questions for the CEOs at Davos, and rightly points out that they’d be valuable for all executives to ponder:

– What’s one major strategic mistake you made over the last two years–and what did you learn from that mistake?

– Did you see the financial meltdown approaching? If not, why not? If so, how did you prepare your company for it?

– What personal sacrifices are you making to respond to the sobering realities of the economy?

– What personal responsibility as a leader do you bear for not acting boldly enough, or speaking out loudly enough, to have helped avert this catastrophe?

We agree.