HOW do you react when your career begins to nose-dive? Are you downcast when success begins to elude you?  There is nobody who is immune from problem; what makes the difference is the way the problem is handled. So, if you are weighed down when you begin to have difficulties in your career instead of finding solution to it, you may not recover.
But have you tried to find out if your success was responsible for your failure?  According to CEO Leadership Institute, the response to success among CEOs has a critical impact on their future. Examples of some CEOs who achieved outstanding success in leading their companies but whose success brought about their own failure subsequently are:
-Ken Lay, CEO of Enron. He tried to extend Enron’s dominance of the US natural gas market and electricity business to power and utility markets across the globe. His over-expansion and blind optimism lead to his demise and at the time the biggest bankruptcy in America.
•Jean-Maria Messier, CEO of Vivendi-Universal, successfully built up a pan-European media company but his ambition to build one of the world’s biggest media empires, as he over-expanded in the US, resulted in his being fired by the company board of directors.
•Bernie Ebbers, CEO of WorldCom, now imprisoned for fraud, created the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history. His false profit reports to the financial markets undermined his phenomenal success in creating a formidable force in the global telecoms business
David Silverman, a professor emeritus in the sociology department of Goldsmiths College, United Kingdom, in the current edition of Harvard Business Review offers advice on how  successful chief executive officers(CEOs) respond to failure. According to him, many have lost  lives on account of failure. This should not be.
Said he: “I’ve recently been talking to CEOs as part of a project I’m working on documenting how people recover from their careers taking unexpected dips. I’ve met people who’ve seen their hopes dashed when they were passed over for promotion, others whose vast fortunes were erased by accounting scandals, those who’ve had their comfortable lives upended when their parents lost their savings and even people who’ve simply and terrifyingly slipped and fell, putting them out of work and nearly into paralysis,” he said.
In all these stories, the common thread has been that while the failure was, theoretically, avoidable, since the cause always came from an unexpected direction it wasn’t really preventable. One man, walking to a doctor’s appointment while worrying about overseas competition for his manufacturing business and political intrigue involving investors, was hit by a car. He literally did not see it coming.
I can empathize with these managers. I once mismanaged my own company into ruin. I had an (initially unknown to me) alcoholic business partner and my trust and faith in him brought us both down. In my case, “only” 200 people lost their jobs and I ended deeply in debt. More difficult to cope with, both my business partner and father died during the crash of the company.
At one point I found myself standing on a Manhattan street, totally motionless, my body unwilling to move forward or backward. Wracked with doubt about every decision I’d ever made, I must have stood there for a half hour. And here’s where the CEOs I’ve talked with are different than me. Faced with failure, they stayed in motion. They quit the bad job, they separated from investors they conflicted with, and they got up off the sidewalk and went back to work. They suffered as much as I did from doubt and worry, but they kept at it.