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By Root 419 0

1998 about what he should do. He could go into consulting, or go to work for someone like Bernard Marcus of the Home Depot, who had been one of the strong supporters of his leadership center at Emory. But Sonnenfeld wasn’t a full-time consultant and he certainly was not a company executive with experience in day-to-day executive responsibilities. He was an educator. And the thing that had made him famous, putting him on national television and receiving favorable press coverage in BusinessWeek, was his CEO college—the meeting that brought together leading CEOs to discuss issues in a candid, off-the-record atmosphere with Sonnenfeld as the very effective moderator and organizer. Although this meeting had been held at Emory, the particular physical location had no implications for the value that the CEOs derived from the get-together.

Sonnenfeld started a nonprofit in Atlanta, the Chief Executive Leadership Institute, and found that many, although not all, of the companies that had supported his center at Emory supported his new endeavor. He took his staff from Emory with him. He maintained his contacts—with NASDAQ and other groups for whom he had done similar meetings. He continued his writing and research. This continuity in activity is what permitted him, along with his eventual exoneration and a favorable CBS 60 Minutes television segment focused on his plight, to rebuild his reputation and successfully return to academia.

ACT AS IF—PROJECTING POWER AND SUCCESS

A very successful former CEO of a human capital software company took a job as a partner with a foreign venture capital firm. The firm’s investments weren’t very good, and, more importantly, Steve soon figured out that he could not work effectively with his overseas partners. They parted ways, and Steve’s next job was as CEO of a small software company in which he had invested while he was still at the venture capital fund. Even though he had left his previous position and was running a company that was both small and in a precarious financial position, in talking to him you would never know there had been any problem at all. He spoke enthusiastically about his current job and the company’s prospects and refused to acknowledge any setback from his venture capital experience. Now an executive vice president at a large international research and consulting firm, Steve’s success in landing a great position derives in no small measure from his never appearing as if there had been any career reversal.

Situations are often ambiguous. Did you resign or were you fired? Was your previous job experience successful or not? One of the ways others are going to ascertain how things turned out is by how you present yourself. Are you upbeat? Do you project power and success or the reverse? This is why developing the ability to act in ways that you may not feel at the moment, described in chapter 7, is such an important skill. You want to convey that everything is fine and under your control, even under dire circumstances.

People want to associate with winners. At the very moment when you have suffered a reversal in fortune and most need help, the best way to attract that help is to act as if you are going to triumph in the end. This advice does not mean that you should not tell people what happened and enlist their aid. It does mean you need to show enough strength and resilience that your potential allies will not believe their efforts to help you will be wasted.

For Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, suing Emory University in Atlanta, where you could hardly find a judge or law firm that didn’t have some tie to Emory or its law school, was emotionally tough. Having to scramble for money to support the new leadership institute was also difficult. But Sonnenfeld, feeling not only wronged but confident in his abilities as an educator and researcher, was able to show toughness and act as if he was going to eventually prevail. That confidence helped him attract the funding for his new center in the first place—no one is going to donate money to an organization that is not going to be able