No matter how high someone climbs the corporate ladder or how many millions they earn, every business leader is still human. They’re bound to stumble and make mistakes—even when steering some of the world’s largest companies. Blackstone cofounder and CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman, for instance, once admitted he was nearly brought to tears after flubbing a major deal with Edgcomb Steel in the mid-1980s.
“It was the third investment in the firm’s history…I had never made investments. And I didn’t even know there were things like investment committees,” Schwarzman recently recalled in Blackstone’s “Life Lessons” series. “I made a mistake, and we basically lost our original investment value.”
