BOOK INTRODUCTION

My coauthor, Bob Jennings, and I believe that everyone aspiring to be successful in business should read this book—MBA students, entrepreneurs, managers, corporate leaders, those just entering the workforce, those with languishing careers. Anyone interested in learning the distinguishing characteristics of those who’ve been at the bottom and have risen to unimaginable levels of success will benefit from reading The Adversity Paradox. We make this bold claim not because we have the last word on attaining success, but because we’ve been moved, challenged, and inspired by what the people featured here have to teach, and we believe you will be, too.

The roots of this book actually started many years ago. I grew up in a very difficult environment. We were very poor, my family life was unstable, and had I continued on my original trajectory, I might have ended up in jail or even dead. But somehow, despite a terribly troubled start, I was able to achieve success both in business and in my personal life.

For a long time I didn’t give much thought to what I now see was a fairly amazing turnaround. But when I moved into management positions and needed to recruit and retain high-quality team members, I began to think about the factors that contributed to the success of employees. I encountered people on every point of the success continuum, from those who proved to be outstanding to those who looked promising but ended as out-and-out failures. Why was it that the candidates with the flawless résumés—top grade point averages at the best schools, all the right internships, prestigious awards—sometimes proved to be our most disappointing hires? Conversely, why was it that candidates who didn’t look so good on paper sometimes turned out to be invaluable team members and employees? Of course, there were exceptions on both sides, but after many successes and failures in the hiring process I began to suspect that there was one trait above all else that reliably predicted that a person would be successful. And it had been right there under my nose, reflected in my own personal story, all along: It was experience in overcoming adversity.

In my latter years of going down this learning curve, my good friend and coauthor Bob Jennings was doing a lot of international recruiting and hiring for his organization. Despite vast geographical and cultural differences, he found the very same thing I had: With few exceptions, if you compared two people with similar educational backgrounds and work experiences, those who’d demonstrated the ability to overcome adversity had a much better chance of succeeding down the road. We continually compared notes, each working to improve our own success trajectories but not thinking a great deal about what our conclusion meant beyond building our own first-class organizations.

Then in 2003 I was inducted into the Horatio Alger Association, an organization that recognizes individuals who have achieved success in spite of significant adversity. The role of adversity in the formation of business savvy and subsequent success suddenly rose to prominence as Bob and I learned the stories of these amazing folks. Soon enough, it seemed as if everywhere we turned we heard or read more stories of people who had overcome adversity and gone on to achieve success. Every story reinforced my earlier suspicion that an individual’s overcoming adversity was the single most significant factor in predicting future success. So Bob and I decided to embark on a journey to find out if my hunch was true.

We conducted interviews and read books, Web sites, articles, and profiles, all the while continuing to gather anecdotal evidence. In the end we studied the lives of hundreds who’d overcome adversity, and some had stories so compelling that we went beyond quantitative research and sought them out for interviews. As suspected, we found the pearls of wisdom below the surface, not in the biographies or the history books. Many of these people exhibited great humility and used such terminology as “luck” and being “at the right place at the right time” to describe their paths to success. But underneath the veneer, each one had a definition of luck that had nothing to do with a fortuitous break or a chance connection, and they all related similar experiences of how overcoming adversity had played such a crucial role in their success trajectories that they now considered adversity their friend. Once we’d gathered all our data, we set out to determine the common characteristics present in these people and how they used the knowledge they’d gained in “befriending adversity” to build the business savvy that enabled their success. The Adversity Paradox, which we have written jointly unless otherwise indicated, is the result of the journey we took to find answers to our questions. We’re honored to share the results with you.

Adversity is not an absolute requirement for building business savvy or for being successful. But it has provided an invaluable crucible of learning for the business leaders featured in The Adversity Paradox, and while you may not experience the extreme forms of adversity they did, it’s inevitable that each and every one of us will encounter adversity at some point in our careers. We hope that you’ll learn how to make adversity your friend and apply the lessons learned from overcoming it to positively impact your success trajectory. We hope you’ll not only gain inspiration from these incredible paths to success but also identify concrete steps you can take to increase your own business savvy. We hope you’ll be emboldened to take action or refocus your determination in your career path. We hope, too, you will pass on to others what you learn. But, above all, we hope you will take away a newfound understanding of yourself and the confidence you need to maximize your business savvy and attain outstanding success.

The Adversity Paradox’s lessons are practical and inspirational, and you can apply them at any stage of your career. You can build a trajectory that will take you to previously unimagined levels of success. You can be one of those people who emerge from even the most humble of beginnings or the most devastating of setbacks to achieve the success you’ve always dreamed of. As these stories will show, no dream is ever impossible.

 

J. Barry Griswell