Deepak Lal demonstrates how opening markets, removing exchange controls and stimulating

competition have begun to move the world away from the state-dominated model that emerged
in the last century. The dichotomy between state control and economic liberalisation is starkly
demonstrated by China, and it is human aspirations that are now driving change worldwide. The
growth of communications and the Internet are making it increasingly difficult to suppress
information e and free access to knowledge is a key driver of classical liberalism. Deepak Lal
believes that classical liberalism has the virtues that are best able to address the ‘ancient poverty of
the Third World’. His greatest fear is that the USA’s ‘New Dirigism’ will combine with other
reactionary forces to frustrate the full achievement of globalisation.
This is a thoughtful, well-researched and challenging book. It has a deep historical
perspective and offers a broad coverage of the continuing battles between regulation and
deregulation, free and managed trade, and between liberty and equality. The globalisation glass
is now either half full or half empty, depending on your viewpoint. The USA, which has never
in its whole history embraced free trade, still clings to its doctrine of reciprocity; unless that
changes the glass may remain half empty.

Adrian Davies
E-mail: ahtdavies@aol.com

doi:10.1016/j.lrp.2008.11.003

Firing Back: How great leaders rebound after disasters

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Andrew Ward, Harvard Business School Press (2007), 306pp., $29.95.

Books on how to become a successful manager, the nature and skills of effective leadership or
the building of business empires are very common, and are closely related to the economic
growth of the last century. The flourishing of business and of leadership are constantly linked
in recent world - and particularly American - history.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is one of the brightest experts in the U.S. corporate leadership field, whose
analyses have always adopted a very particular and focused point of view. (Thus his most recent
prize-winning best-seller The Hero’s Farewell: What Happens When CEOs Retire considers that
specific critical moment of ‘discontinuity’ in corporate leadership.) Now he joins forces with
Andrew Ward, a scholar interested in the role and challenges of the CEO and author of The
Leadership Lifecycle: Matching Leaders to Evolving Organizations. The result is this volume
showing how business leaders can handle the challenge of recovering a lost or severely damaged
leadership position. In their own words, they ‘examine the often abrupt and unexpected fall from
grace of prominent leaders and the process by which they recover and even exceed their past
accomplishments with new adventures’. The book will fascinate those interested in the process of
‘rise and fall, and rise again’.
The authors focus their attention on one vital characteristic possessed by the best leaders:
resilience e a personal quality that is independent from context and historical moment. Those
that have it can overcome difficulties, and even use them as stimuli for future superior
achievements. In fact, resilience seems to put into practice an often-discussed argument: that
learning from failures is a more robust way to build success than simply examining cumulative
victories.
This is not an airport-bookstall self-help book offering facile recipes e it is a meticulous
work by outstanding scholars, who have theoretical foundations rooted in several disciplines

116 Book Reviews

combined with wide empirical evidence. Each concept, phenomenon and idea is explained in
a multi-faceted fashion, and illustrated with information gathered first hand from multiple
in-depth interviews with senior U.S. business leaders.
The introduction contains two chapters. The first - appealingly titled The Disappointment of
Defeat or the Defeat of Disappointment e presents the book’s main idea, and discusses the
contents of subsequent chapters. In the second, the authors frame situations illuminating the
concepts and the process that constitute the core of the book, usefully separating professional
career setbacks from other personal misfortunes such as family losses or natural disasters. The
virtuous circle of actions needed to achieve ‘professional rebound’ (which constitutes their
theoretical model of resilience) is explained.
Next follow four chapters of detailed discussions of the four types of barriers against
successfully attaining career rebound: societal barriers, cultural and corporate barriers, barriers
related to the actual circumstances of the leader’s departure, and those caused by to
psychological stresses.
A chapter is then devoted to each of the five components for recovery in the authors’ model:
triumphing against stress and trauma; using social networks to re-enter the game; rebuilding
heroic stature and personal reputation; proving their own mettle; and rediscovering the heroic
mission at the heart of future ventures. The book closes with a brief chapter of ‘learned lessons’
and a summary of the main contributions of the work, illustrating the authors’ proposed
recovery process with some significant individual histories.
In terms of analysing the barriers to recovering professional status, two chapters deal with
the obstacles from the general (societal barriers) and specific (corporate cultures) environment.
A further chapter addresses the barriers arising from the individual’s psychological
mechanisms, while another combines both dimensions to address the issue of tracking the
causes of CEO failure and the resulting damage.
Analysing societal barriers, the authors discard financial worries as a source of business
leaders’ stress, in view of the compensation levels they generally receive. The main problems are
the need for fallen leaders to recognize, analyse and learn from their failure, handle the double-
edged sword of celebrity, and cope with the effects of their loss on their social environment. In
an analysis based on career systems theory the authors identify corporate cultures as barriers to
recovery: specifically, problems are explained according to organizational cultures, with
a baseball team, an academy, a club and a fortress as metaphoric types.
Chapter 5 is one of the most interesting, where different causes of failure are described and
associated with the difficulties of recovering in each case. In essence, recovery involves damage
control and trying to evaluate the level of CEO reputational damage, essential in trying to
estimate the real possibilities of recovery. The authors’ empirical research analyses 456 CEO
exits over a 5 year period to show that, when the CEO’s reputation was damaged, 55% of the
exits led on to retirement, but, when their reputation remained ‘neutral’, 66% recovered to find
further active executive or advisory roles.
The psychological barriers leaders face in overcoming setbacks are deeply intertwined
with the actions suggested in the authors’ theoretical model of resilience. To give their
illustration a clearer sequence, the authors place the elements they see as critical for
recovery at the beginning and end of their model. They talk about the need for leaders to
fight back against adversity by developing an existential purpose that allows them to
rediscover their sense of heroic mission. To be successful requires deep personal reflection,
linking the leader’s past, present, and future situations to fuel their ultimate recovery
actions. This process begins by avoiding the temptation of accepting (or adapting to)
adversity, although it is necessary for leaders to take time to think carefully about their

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situation, to re-assert control over their lives, and to define exactly against what or whom
they should fight.
Along with this personal, transcendental, reasoning - that constitutes the heart of resilience -
the leader will need to take more active measures for making recovery a reality. Once again, the
authors’ scheme distinguishes between external, internal and reputation factors. Social support
can be found in the network of acquaintances and close friends: while the former offer the best
way of scanning the field for new opportunities, the latter will have a stronger role in helping
leaders overcome psychological barriers.
Inspiring enthusiasm among those who might embark on a leader’s new adventure is
obligatory, and reputation management is also critical in gaining allies and transmitting
confidence about their future success. The leader needs to clear their name, tell their version of
the story about their fall and its origins, and point at where the ‘real responsibility’ lay. Here
Sonnenfeld and Ward use the case of Martha Stewart to illustrate the difficulties in managing
social perceptions about past facts and leader’s behaviour.
Firing Back is a clear and is well-written book, which takes advantage of the authors’
backgrounds without exactly being framed for academics. It shows an excellent balance
between theory and ideas, and practical experience. Points follow logically from each other,
fitting together into the main structure presented at the start. The reader is brought back to
reality by the interviews, which are refreshing, attractive and opportune, making reading
interesting. (A deeper and longer discussion about the role social networks play in leaders’
recovery might have been interesting, but perhaps this topic is appealing enough in itself for
another book?) The authors succeed in transmitting real feelings, and the optimism and desires
of recovering managers becomes contagious: closing the book, you find yourself full of
a positive will to recover control of your life.
We can thoroughly recommend this book to anyone who has suffered a professional setback,
as well as to those who consider humans unable to learn from their failures. Practitioners and
academics interested in leadership should enjoy how this important topic is covered in an
informed way, and in a style that makes it an easy read. Anyone looking for a guide to
professional and personal improvement should read it, as it contains the true spirit of great
leaders. But be careful; this spirit is so well transmitted, just by dipping into the chapters, you
could easily find yourself possessed and unable to put it down until the end - or even until your
professional recovery is complete!

Pedro López Sáez and Gregorio Martı́n de Castro

Business Administration Department,
Universidad Complutense de Madrid,
Campus de Somosaguas, 28223 Madrid, Spain
E-mail: gmartinc@ccee.ucm.es

doi:10.1016/j.lrp.2008.11.004

118 Book Reviews