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Conversations in Management

Bill Heinz

In the end, all of us have something in common: We're all losers.

Ouch! Fortunately, Heinz went on to explain that nobody wins all the time. Whether you’re talking sports or the game of life, no one is ever on a permanent winning streak. Heinz was certainly one to know. He’d seen the game of life played out from the deck of the USS Nebraska—a ship resurrected from the destruction at Pearl Harbor—as it shelled enemy fortifications on D-Day. He’d stayed in the game as he slogged through France and Germany with front line GI’s. By the time the war ended he’d learned more than he’d ever hoped to know about the game of life.

The world of sports, however, was something he never tired of. Before he was a war correspondent, he’d been a sports writer for the New York Sun and he returned to that career when the war finally ended. He was considered a natural. He understood not only the games, but the back stories as well. He brought a literary quality to the genre that enabled him to illustrate the heart behind the play. This became evident after the Sun folded in 1950 and he took up feature writing full time. He gained almost immediate national attention with a piece in True Magazine titled, Brownsville Bum. It was the story of Bummy Davis, a hard-luck retired boxer who died fighting off a couple of hoods with his bare hands. Heinz, brought the same intensity to his bestselling novel, The Professional—a work called, “The only good novel about a fighter I’ve ever read,” by boxing aficionado, Ernest Hemingway. With his interest in sports heroes, it was no surprise when he made his way to Green Bay, Wisconsin in 1962. After a year-long collaboration with Vince Lombardi, Run to Daylight was published to overwhelming and continuous acclaim. It was another best seller for Heinz but its success paled in comparison to another of his works that, oddly enough, few attribute to him. That novel was a collaborative effort between Heinz and Dr. Richard Hornberger; a physician who had served with the Army during the Korean War. The book they published in 1968 under the joint pseudonym Richard Hooker, was M*A*S*H.

Granted, Bill Heinz lived a life characterized by more spectacular wins than losses, but his point is well taken. Given that even the best of us don’t chalk up a success with every effort, the question becomes, how do you deal with failure? Interestingly, your education, training and experience have little to do with how you answer this question. Rather, it’s a matter of personality. Some of the brightest and best educated folks among us take any failure personally. They’re embarrassed or ashamed and believe they’ve let themselves down if their best effort doesn’t achieve a sterling result. When faced with a series of setbacks, they can become brutally self-critical and inordinately risk aversive. They might even come to believe that they’re inferior to their colleagues and will never quite measure up. But there’s a better way to handle failure. It starts with the realization that Heinz’ curmudgeonly “we’re all losers” is pretty much on the mark. Once you realize everyone is susceptible, it’s easier not to take it personally. It’s also helpful to recognize that while a failure has many causes, there is always one constant—you can learn from it. Folks who take the time to study their mistakes tend not to repeat them. They recognize that every failure provides forward momentum when used as a springboard for personal growth. They know that the only embarrassing setback is the one that isn’t mined for new insights. Learning from your mistakes will turn every loss into a win. Now how would Heinz reconcile that!

—Ebert