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Almost 30 years ago, former secretary of state for war John Profumo sat beside the Queen at a dinner at Claridge’s marking Baroness Thatcher’s 70th birthday. It was an episode his Financial Times obituary described as an “almost Tolstoyan story of hubris, punishment and redemption”.
His presence at the dinner marked a decades-long rehabilitation through his charitable work — a discreet second act that followed his 1963 resignation after he lied about a scandalous affair.
I had looked up Profumo’s obituary following the comeback tour of former UK prime minister, Liz Truss, to publicise her book, Ten Years to Save the West. I wanted to remind myself that some people quietly atone for their mistakes. When I read of the Claridge’s dinner, it was easy to imagine Truss elbowing Profumo aside to thrust her book into the monarch’s hands for a selfie.
Unlike Truss, Profumo didn’t flog a book or hog the airwaves, but quietly put his experience and network to use on behalf of Toynbee Hall, a charity in London’s East End.
Truss’s latest activities only cemented my worry that we are in the age of chutzpah, when failure is not followed by a humbling admission or analysed as a way to improve, but something to be bulldozed out of the way with bulletproof confidence.
She’s not the only one. David Cameron is back on the world stage as foreign secretary, after resigning as prime minister in the wake of the Brexit vote, and advising Greensill Capital, a company at the heart of one of the biggest modern British lobbying scandals. In the US, Donald Trump is the presumptive Republican presidential candidate despite battling four criminal court cases.
Business has seen the return of WeWork co-founder, Adam Neumann, the embodiment of chutzpah, who once said: “We are here in order to change the world . . . Nothing less than that interests me.” High claims for a chain of artfully distressed offices. His attempt to buy back the co-working company that ousted him as chief executive five years earlier was recently thwarted.
Changpeng Zhao, founder and former chief executive of the cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, has reportedly been laying the groundwork for a post-jail comeback. This week he was sentenced to four months in prison, after personally receiving a $50mn fine, and a $4.3bn penalty for the exchange, relating to money laundering and breaching sanctions.
It might be unfair to lump liars and convicted criminals together with those whose only crimes were misjudgments or hubris. But what they all clearly share is main character syndrome, and reluctance to be cast into the shadows.
In part, the blame for this chutzpah must lie in the trend for embracing failure. No longer is it deemed a disaster, but one obstacle on the path to success. Through that prism, Truss could be considered the motivational poster girl of a movement to #overcomeadversity.
However in her book, Right Kind of Wrong, management professor Amy Edmondson is troubled that “‘fail fast, fail often’ has become a Silicon Valley mantra . . . and corporate failure parties and failure résumés have become popular”. Much media discussion of failure, she argues, is “simple and superficial — more rhetoric than reality.” Careers need not be ruined by a mis-step. But failure requires constructive, intelligent analysis if we are to actually do better.
Perhaps it is also a backlash to public shaming on social media, where a badly-worded tweet going viral can inflict great psychological and career wounds. Jon Ronson’s 2015 book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, recounted stories of people who suffered severe consequences as a result of social media, such as Lindsey Stone, the US care worker who lost her job because of a tasteless photo posted on Facebook. Recently, Ronson said he thought “this frenzy of public shaming on Twitter [now X]” was over, in part, because Elon Musk’s acquisition had driven “left-wing bullies” to other platforms. It may have dialled down — although right-wing bullies can be pretty relentless too.
No doubt some have decided that tolerating shaming is the best option or that we have become so saturated with shame that we are immune to it.
André Spicer, professor of organisational behaviour at Bayes Business School, believes social media still stokes anxiety among users but in some instances “shamelessness has become a coping mechanism” or in the most extreme cases, a “way of getting attention”.
The age of chutzpah may yet drag on.
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