Kogod professor Robert Sicina nearly failed to write the book on failure

In 2003, after launching the popular Kogod class Learn from Failure: The Key to Successful Decision Making, Sicina—then a professorial lecturer in the Department of International Business—was encouraged by students to pen a text based on the course. 

With a bachelor’s in engineering and an MBA in finance, Sicina felt unqualified to write a book, but the idea kept rattling around in his mind, and in 2012, he began to explore it.

Sicina believed that people flop in business for the same reasons military leaders fail in warfare. Not knowing anything about combat, he contacted US Marine Corps Col. Thomas X. Hammes, author of The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century. 

Over lunch, Sicina shared a thesis he’d written on failure. “[Hammes] looked at it and said, ‘That looks like the makings of a book,’” Sicina says. “I laughed. I told him that I’ve never written anything more than three pages long.” Hammes stood firm, persuaded Sicina he could author a book, and said he’d edit it. 

Sicina cruised through the first four chapters. Then, like a car with a dying battery, he stalled. “The first chapters were about why we fail,” he says. “Chapter 5 was about how to succeed. I had some theories about that, but as I put pen to paper, I lost faith that they were valid.”

Sicina says he contemplated deleting the entire file. “I felt like a failure.” 

He regrouped, however, and resumed writing—albeit just a few sentences a week. It took two years for Sicina to complete the fifth chapter and a few months to write the final two. He published Learn from Failure: The Key to Successful Decision Making in 2017.

The experience underscored the corrosiveness of self-doubt, Sicina says. “The lesson is to believe in yourself and to persist. Self-doubt erodes one’s ability to effectively produce, to effectively operate, to effectively write.”