Winning After Losing

Book excerpt: Individuals, teams, and organizations must become more resilient in today's complex world, and each one will experience failure at some point. Successful individuals, teams, and organizations bounce back. Winning After Losing, Building Resilient Teams offers a collection of lessons on leadership and resilience, of winning teams. I am writing this book as a retired U.S. Army three-star General, and as the former Chief Operating Officer of a public biotechnology company. Each leadership role taught me valuable lessons, whether serving with tactical units, at the corporate level in The Pentagon, or in seemingly impossible global missions. After transitioning into the business environment, many of these lessons of leadership and teamwork continued to make a significant positive impact. All businesses experience failure at some point in their growth, and they can bounce back through great leadership and teamwork. Whether in the military, government, or business, it is possible to build winning resilient teams. Resilience is the capacity to recover. It is the effort expended to bend but not break despite trauma, tragedy, adversity, or crisis. Ultimately resilience is adapting based on lessons learned, to bounce back stronger than before. If you like winning, learn as much as possible from the experience of losing...that is what resilient teams do so well. Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Bostick